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http://www.alternet.org/world/israeli-security-veterans-speak-out-against-netanyahu-calling-him-danger-israelIsraeli Security Veterans Speak Out Against Netanyahu, Calling Him a 'Danger' to Israelhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/86296399/0/alternet_world~Israeli-Security-Veterans-Speak-Out-Against-Netanyahu-Calling-Him-a-Danger-to-Israel

Former generals urge Netanyahu to cancel his speech to Congress before damaging U.S. relations even further.

In an unprecedented move, 200 veterans of the Israeli security services accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday of being a “danger” to Israel.

The new group, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, warned that Netanyahu was doing irreparable harm to the country’s relationship with Washington, just two days before he is due to address the US Congress.

The Israeli prime minister is expected to use the speech to try to undermine negotiations currently taking place between major world powers and Iran. He has claimed that any agreement reached at the talks’ conclusion, later this month, will leave Iran a “nuclear threshold state” hellbent on destroying Israel.

Half a dozen former generals spoke out at a press conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, urging Netanyahu to cancel the speech before ties with the US deteriorate even further.

The White House is reported to be furious that Netanyahu arranged his appearance before Congress behind President Barack Obama’s back.

With an Israeli election less than three weeks away, Netanyahu has already faced attacks from centrist political rivals and parts of the Israeli media over his clashes with the White House on Iran.

But it is the first time he has faced a large-scale backlash from members of Israel’s security establishment – and the statement of the 200 is likely to be more damaging to Netanyahu’s popular image as a strong leader on security matters.

The group comprises retired officers and those serving in the reserves, all of whom held a rank equivalent to general. Many are household names.

Yaron Ezrahi, a politics professor at Hebrew University and expert on Israeli-US relations, said there was no precedent for what he termed a “rebellion” by so many former senior officials.

“This is a very powerful and distinguished group of former commanders, who are extremely worried about where Netanyahu is taking Israel right now,” he said.

“It is clear they are speaking not only for themselves but also on behalf of many active commanders who are not allowed to speak their mind but share this group’s views.”

6,000 years of experience

General Amnon Reshef, widely regarded in Israel as a hero for his role in the 1973 war against Egypt and Syria, said the group’s membership had grown rapidly since he established it three months ago.

“We are experts with more than 6,000 years of security experience between us,” he told Middle East Eye. “It is time the prime minister listened to us before he wrecks our strategic interests with our closest ally.

“Nothing good for Israel can come from humiliating the US president.”

Among the generals denouncing Netanyahu on Sunday was Amiram Levin, a former head of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, in which Netanyahu himself served.

Reshef’s attack echoed that of Meir Dagan, a former head of Israel’s spy agency Mossad, who has called separately for Israeli voters to remove Netanyahu.

Dagan, who is due to speak at an anti-Netanyahu rally next Saturday, told the Yedioth Aharonoth daily last Friday that the Israeli prime minister was taking “intolerable risks” with Israel’s security.

“The veto umbrella provided by the Americans [at the United Nations Security Council] could vanish, and Israel would promptly find itself facing international sanctions,” he added.

Ezrahi said the spate of attacks on Netanyahu by such high-level figures could become a “turning-point” in the elections.

“The difference between a right-wing Netanyahu government and a centrist one is a handful of seats, so these criticisms have the potential to do him a lot of damage.”

Netanyahu’s stance on Iran received a further blow last week with publication of a leaked Mossad document. It showed that he had misled the United Nations in 2012 about his own intelligence services’ assessment of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme.

According to the Mossad report, Tehran was not actively pursuing a military nuclear programme. In contrast, Netanyahu had warned the international community that the Iranians were only a year away from building a bomb.

Iran denies that its nuclear research is aimed at developing weapons, saying it seeks only a civilian energy programme.

Growing distrust

In a possible sign of the increasing distrust between the Israeli prime minister and his closest security officials, Netanyahu is reported to have kept his national security adviser, Yossi Cohen, in the dark about his address to Congress.

The US media reported last week that Cohen, a former senior Mossad official, had privately expressed concern to US officials about Netanyahu’s speech.

Reshef said that the group would use its high profile to wage a public relations campaign to persuade the Israeli public that Netanyahu’s approach was wrong.

“It is not going to be easy,” he said. “Israelis have been brainwashed for many years. We need to give them a different message – they need to understand the real situation and Israel’s true interests.”

A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute recently found that 58 per cent of Israeli Jews believed a Netanyahu government would be best placed to deal with Israel’s security issues.

Reshef said Commanders for Israel’s Security had wider concerns about Netanyahu’s policy in the region.

The group was set up late last year to put pressure on Netanyahu’s government to re-enter peace talks with the Palestinians based on the Arab Peace Initiative, a Saudi plan that would normalise relations between Israel and the Arab world in return for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“We can’t keep waging a war every couple of years in Gaza or with our neighbours,” said Reshef.

Netanyahu has in the past justified his refusal to agree to a complete withdrawal from the occupied West Bank on the grounds that Iran would set up “terror bases” there as soon as the army left.

Reshef rejected this scenario. “The IDF (Israeli army) is very strong and can defend Israel’s borders. We can deal with the threats from all of Israel’s enemies.”

Hawkish views

The group includes security veterans known for their hawkish positions, including former military chief of staff Dan Halutz. He called for leftwing activists who criticised an operation he ordered in 2002 against Hamas leader Salah Shahadeh in Gaza that killed more than a dozen Palestinian civilians, most of them children, to be tried for treason.

Ezrahi told MEE there were two specific factors driving the security establishment’s campaign against Netanyahu.

The first related to the damage he was seen to be doing to the traditionally strong ties between the Israeli and US militaries.

“These commanders have spent a lot of time in the US, at the Pentagon. They have a close working relationship with the US command and rely on their support for equipment, strategy, intelligence-sharing. All of that is under threat from Netanyahu’s behaviour.”

Further, Netanyahu’s removal of a diplomatic horizon had left senior commanders feeling they were carrying an impossible burden in policing the occupied territories.

“They recognise that there is no military solution to Israel’s predicament with the Palestinians and that borders created by force are inherently fragile and insecure.”

Tamir Pardo, the current Mossad head, is reported to have privately rejected Netanyahu’s claim that dealing with Iran was Israel’s top priority. According to the Haaretz newspaper, he told a group of Israeli businesspeople last summer that the “biggest threat to Israel’s security is the conflict with the Palestinians and not Iran’s nuclear programme.”

Of particular concern among the security agencies, said Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, has been Netanyahu’s threats to launch an attack on Iran without support from Washington.

“The view is that an Israeli attack could only set back Iran’s nuclear programme a few months or a year, but the consequences in the region would be harsh indeed,” he said. “They don’t see any benefits from Netanyahu’s approach, but they do see a lot of dangers.”

Jittery about Pentagon ties

Almost as soon as he stepped down as head of Mossad four years ago, Dagan slammed Netanyahu’s idea of an Israeli attack on Iran, calling it the “stupidest thing I have ever heard”.

In his interview on Friday, Dagan said covert operations designed to bring about regime change were a better approach: “What we could have done was gain time with secret operations or nurture opposition forces and minorities within Iran.”

According to Israeli analyst Ben Caspit, the security establishment has become increasingly jittery about the future of its relationship with the Pentagon.

Caspit said some officials were worried that the US might consider abandoning its traditional Middle East allies, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, in favour of strengthening relations with Tehran. They fear that the Pentagon might conclude its support for Iran is more important in stabilising the region than backing Israel.

Citing a senior US official, Caspit dismissed the idea as a “conspiracy theory”, but observed it was one gaining traction among Israeli security service staff.

Such fears will only have been heightened by reports that the Obama administration is refusing to share information with Israel about the Iran talks after suspicions that Netanyahu has been leaking details to undermine the White House’s position.

Ezrahi said Netanyahu was currently more concerned about keeping the electoral support of his right-wing constituency than antagonising his military commanders.

Netanyahu had earlier staked much of his credibility with the Israeli public on bombing Iran but had been blocked by opposition from his commanders, as well as the US and Europe, added Ezrahi.

He now needed to create a similar kind of “drama to prove he is a tough military leader” by taking on the White House in place of Iran. Ezrahi said: “The speech is like a diplomatic missile aimed directly at the White House.”

That view was confirmed by Israeli political analyst Yossi Verter. He said Netanyahu’s election strategists had concluded that “every American slap in Netanyahu’s face only strengthens support for their party’s leader among his electoral base.” One reportedly told him: “Obama is our best campaigner.”

Uri Avnery, a veteran peace activist and former MP, wrote at the weekend that the address to Congress would be a perfect election stunt for Netanyahu. “It will show him at his best. The great statesman, addressing the most important parliament in the world, pleading for the very existence of Israel.”

If Netanyahu wins the election on 17 March, as is currently predicted, Ezrahi expected him to seek a unity government with the centrist Zionist Camp party. “He will be facing threats of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, and will want to present a more moderate face to the world.”

Former generals urge Netanyahu to cancel his speech to Congress before damaging U.S. relations even further.

In an unprecedented move, 200 veterans of the Israeli security services accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday of being a “danger” to Israel.

The new group, called Commanders for Israel’s Security, warned that Netanyahu was doing irreparable harm to the country’s relationship with Washington, just two days before he is due to address the US Congress.

The Israeli prime minister is expected to use the speech to try to undermine negotiations currently taking place between major world powers and Iran. He has claimed that any agreement reached at the talks’ conclusion, later this month, will leave Iran a “nuclear threshold state” hellbent on destroying Israel.

Half a dozen former generals spoke out at a press conference in Tel Aviv on Sunday, urging Netanyahu to cancel the speech before ties with the US deteriorate even further.

The White House is reported to be furious that Netanyahu arranged his appearance before Congress behind President Barack Obama’s back.

With an Israeli election less than three weeks away, Netanyahu has already faced attacks from centrist political rivals and parts of the Israeli media over his clashes with the White House on Iran.

But it is the first time he has faced a large-scale backlash from members of Israel’s security establishment – and the statement of the 200 is likely to be more damaging to Netanyahu’s popular image as a strong leader on security matters.

The group comprises retired officers and those serving in the reserves, all of whom held a rank equivalent to general. Many are household names.

Yaron Ezrahi, a politics professor at Hebrew University and expert on Israeli-US relations, said there was no precedent for what he termed a “rebellion” by so many former senior officials.

“This is a very powerful and distinguished group of former commanders, who are extremely worried about where Netanyahu is taking Israel right now,” he said.

“It is clear they are speaking not only for themselves but also on behalf of many active commanders who are not allowed to speak their mind but share this group’s views.”

6,000 years of experience

General Amnon Reshef, widely regarded in Israel as a hero for his role in the 1973 war against Egypt and Syria, said the group’s membership had grown rapidly since he established it three months ago.

“We are experts with more than 6,000 years of security experience between us,” he told Middle East Eye. “It is time the prime minister listened to us before he wrecks our strategic interests with our closest ally.

“Nothing good for Israel can come from humiliating the US president.”

Among the generals denouncing Netanyahu on Sunday was Amiram Levin, a former head of the elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit, in which Netanyahu himself served.

Reshef’s attack echoed that of Meir Dagan, a former head of Israel’s spy agency Mossad, who has called separately for Israeli voters to remove Netanyahu.

Dagan, who is due to speak at an anti-Netanyahu rally next Saturday, told the Yedioth Aharonoth daily last Friday that the Israeli prime minister was taking “intolerable risks” with Israel’s security.

“The veto umbrella provided by the Americans [at the United Nations Security Council] could vanish, and Israel would promptly find itself facing international sanctions,” he added.

Ezrahi said the spate of attacks on Netanyahu by such high-level figures could become a “turning-point” in the elections.

“The difference between a right-wing Netanyahu government and a centrist one is a handful of seats, so these criticisms have the potential to do him a lot of damage.”

Netanyahu’s stance on Iran received a further blow last week with publication of a leaked Mossad document. It showed that he had misled the United Nations in 2012 about his own intelligence services’ assessment of the threat posed by Iran’s nuclear programme.

According to the Mossad report, Tehran was not actively pursuing a military nuclear programme. In contrast, Netanyahu had warned the international community that the Iranians were only a year away from building a bomb.

Iran denies that its nuclear research is aimed at developing weapons, saying it seeks only a civilian energy programme.

Growing distrust

In a possible sign of the increasing distrust between the Israeli prime minister and his closest security officials, Netanyahu is reported to have kept his national security adviser, Yossi Cohen, in the dark about his address to Congress.

The US media reported last week that Cohen, a former senior Mossad official, had privately expressed concern to US officials about Netanyahu’s speech.

Reshef said that the group would use its high profile to wage a public relations campaign to persuade the Israeli public that Netanyahu’s approach was wrong.

“It is not going to be easy,” he said. “Israelis have been brainwashed for many years. We need to give them a different message – they need to understand the real situation and Israel’s true interests.”

A poll by the Israel Democracy Institute recently found that 58 per cent of Israeli Jews believed a Netanyahu government would be best placed to deal with Israel’s security issues.

Reshef said Commanders for Israel’s Security had wider concerns about Netanyahu’s policy in the region.

The group was set up late last year to put pressure on Netanyahu’s government to re-enter peace talks with the Palestinians based on the Arab Peace Initiative, a Saudi plan that would normalise relations between Israel and the Arab world in return for the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“We can’t keep waging a war every couple of years in Gaza or with our neighbours,” said Reshef.

Netanyahu has in the past justified his refusal to agree to a complete withdrawal from the occupied West Bank on the grounds that Iran would set up “terror bases” there as soon as the army left.

Reshef rejected this scenario. “The IDF (Israeli army) is very strong and can defend Israel’s borders. We can deal with the threats from all of Israel’s enemies.”

Hawkish views

The group includes security veterans known for their hawkish positions, including former military chief of staff Dan Halutz. He called for leftwing activists who criticised an operation he ordered in 2002 against Hamas leader Salah Shahadeh in Gaza that killed more than a dozen Palestinian civilians, most of them children, to be tried for treason.

Ezrahi told MEE there were two specific factors driving the security establishment’s campaign against Netanyahu.

The first related to the damage he was seen to be doing to the traditionally strong ties between the Israeli and US militaries.

“These commanders have spent a lot of time in the US, at the Pentagon. They have a close working relationship with the US command and rely on their support for equipment, strategy, intelligence-sharing. All of that is under threat from Netanyahu’s behaviour.”

Further, Netanyahu’s removal of a diplomatic horizon had left senior commanders feeling they were carrying an impossible burden in policing the occupied territories.

“They recognise that there is no military solution to Israel’s predicament with the Palestinians and that borders created by force are inherently fragile and insecure.”

Tamir Pardo, the current Mossad head, is reported to have privately rejected Netanyahu’s claim that dealing with Iran was Israel’s top priority. According to the Haaretz newspaper, he told a group of Israeli businesspeople last summer that the “biggest threat to Israel’s security is the conflict with the Palestinians and not Iran’s nuclear programme.”

Of particular concern among the security agencies, said Neve Gordon, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva, has been Netanyahu’s threats to launch an attack on Iran without support from Washington.

“The view is that an Israeli attack could only set back Iran’s nuclear programme a few months or a year, but the consequences in the region would be harsh indeed,” he said. “They don’t see any benefits from Netanyahu’s approach, but they do see a lot of dangers.”

Jittery about Pentagon ties

Almost as soon as he stepped down as head of Mossad four years ago, Dagan slammed Netanyahu’s idea of an Israeli attack on Iran, calling it the “stupidest thing I have ever heard”.

In his interview on Friday, Dagan said covert operations designed to bring about regime change were a better approach: “What we could have done was gain time with secret operations or nurture opposition forces and minorities within Iran.”

According to Israeli analyst Ben Caspit, the security establishment has become increasingly jittery about the future of its relationship with the Pentagon.

Caspit said some officials were worried that the US might consider abandoning its traditional Middle East allies, such as Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, in favour of strengthening relations with Tehran. They fear that the Pentagon might conclude its support for Iran is more important in stabilising the region than backing Israel.

Citing a senior US official, Caspit dismissed the idea as a “conspiracy theory”, but observed it was one gaining traction among Israeli security service staff.

Such fears will only have been heightened by reports that the Obama administration is refusing to share information with Israel about the Iran talks after suspicions that Netanyahu has been leaking details to undermine the White House’s position.

Ezrahi said Netanyahu was currently more concerned about keeping the electoral support of his right-wing constituency than antagonising his military commanders.

Netanyahu had earlier staked much of his credibility with the Israeli public on bombing Iran but had been blocked by opposition from his commanders, as well as the US and Europe, added Ezrahi.

He now needed to create a similar kind of “drama to prove he is a tough military leader” by taking on the White House in place of Iran. Ezrahi said: “The speech is like a diplomatic missile aimed directly at the White House.”

That view was confirmed by Israeli political analyst Yossi Verter. He said Netanyahu’s election strategists had concluded that “every American slap in Netanyahu’s face only strengthens support for their party’s leader among his electoral base.” One reportedly told him: “Obama is our best campaigner.”

Uri Avnery, a veteran peace activist and former MP, wrote at the weekend that the address to Congress would be a perfect election stunt for Netanyahu. “It will show him at his best. The great statesman, addressing the most important parliament in the world, pleading for the very existence of Israel.”

If Netanyahu wins the election on 17 March, as is currently predicted, Ezrahi expected him to seek a unity government with the centrist Zionist Camp party. “He will be facing threats of economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation, and will want to present a more moderate face to the world.”

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/world/noam-chomsky-us-thinks-israel-offshore-military-baseNoam Chomsky: U.S. Thinks of Israel as an 'Offshore Military Base'http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/86279341/0/alternet_world~Noam-Chomsky-US-Thinks-of-Israel-as-an-Offshore-Military-Base

The U.S. helped provide the arms to Israel in last year's destruction of Gaza.

Six months after the end of a devastating Israeli assault on Gaza, aid agencies have condemned the lack of progress in rebuilding Gaza, saying reconstruction of tens of thousands of destroyed homes, schools and hospitals has been "woefully slow," with 100,000 Palestinians still displaced. Our guest, Noam Chomsky, notes it was the Pentagon that supplied many of the weapons used in the massive destruction. "The arms were taken from arms the U.S. stores in Israel. They are pre-positioned in Israel for eventual use by U.S. forces," Chomsky says. "Israel is regarded essentially as an offshore military base."

Below is an interview with Chomsky, followed by a transcript:

AARON MATÉ: And meanwhile, support for the occupation continues, so much so that during the Gaza assault the U.S. rearmed Israel.

NOAMCHOMSKY: It was kind of interesting how the U.S. rearmed Israel. The arms—it’s true that the Pentagon sent more arms to Israel. They were actually running out of arms in this vicious assault against a totally defenseless population. The arms were taken from arms that the U.S. stores in Israel; they’re pre-positioned in Israel for eventual use by U.S. forces. That’s one part of the U.S.-Israel strategic alliance. That’s one small part of it, is that Israel is regarded as essentially an offshore military base. So we store, pre-position arms there, and some of those arms were transferred to Israeli control so that they could complete—continue the massive destruction of Gaza, which is horrific and one of many indications of the nature of the alliance.

It’s a very close alliance, and deep enough—so, for example, one of the interesting leaks from WikiLeaks was a U.S. government study of—a Pentagon study of sites in the world that are of such high significance that we must protect them at all costs. One of them was right near Haifa. It was the Rafael military industries. It’s one of the main producers of drones and other high-tech military equipment. And the relation—and that’s one of the highest—strategic sites of highest importance. And, in fact, the relationship is so close that Rafael actually transferred its management offices to Washington, where the money is and the contacts are. It’s essentially an offshore military base, in many ways, also a major source for U.S. investment, high-tech investment. So, Intel, for example, is setting up its major new facility for next-generation chips in Israel. Warren Buffett just bought a big Israeli company. There are many very close relationships, and they’re not going to be affecting by a personal conflict between Baker and Shamir or Obama and Netanyahu.

AMYGOODMAN: And the Obama administration has taken great pains, even as this division has taken place, to show its support for Israel. On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. has intervened on Israel’s behalf hundreds of times in the international arena.

SECRETARY OF STATEJOHNKERRY: Prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the United States, obviously, and we have a closer relationship with Israel right now in terms of security than at any time in history. I was reviewing the record the other day. We have intervened on Israel’s behalf in the last two years more than several hundred—a couple of hundred times in over 75 different fora in order to protect Israel.

AMYGOODMAN: That was U.S. secretary of state on ABC’s This Week. Noam Chomsky?

NOAMCHOMSKY: And it’s interesting to look at the cases. The most—one of them actually received a fair amount of publicity, because it was so remarkable. That was, I suppose, February 2011, roughly, at the U.N. Security Council. There was a resolution proposed at the Security Council calling on Israel to abide by official U.S. policy. The official U.S. policy is objection to settlement expansion. It’s a pretty minor issue, incidentally. That’s what’s talked about. But the issue is the settlements, not the expansion. They’re all illegal. They’re criminal activities. They undermine any hope for any peaceful settlement. But U.S. policy is that settlement expansion is, as they put it, not helpful to peace. The Security Council proposed a resolution asking Israel to abide by official U.S. policy. Obama vetoed it. You know, that’s real support for Israel.

The U.S. helped provide the arms to Israel in last year's destruction of Gaza.

Six months after the end of a devastating Israeli assault on Gaza, aid agencies have condemned the lack of progress in rebuilding Gaza, saying reconstruction of tens of thousands of destroyed homes, schools and hospitals has been "woefully slow," with 100,000 Palestinians still displaced. Our guest, Noam Chomsky, notes it was the Pentagon that supplied many of the weapons used in the massive destruction. "The arms were taken from arms the U.S. stores in Israel. They are pre-positioned in Israel for eventual use by U.S. forces," Chomsky says. "Israel is regarded essentially as an offshore military base."

Below is an interview with Chomsky, followed by a transcript:

AARON MATÉ: And meanwhile, support for the occupation continues, so much so that during the Gaza assault the U.S. rearmed Israel.

NOAMCHOMSKY: It was kind of interesting how the U.S. rearmed Israel. The arms—it’s true that the Pentagon sent more arms to Israel. They were actually running out of arms in this vicious assault against a totally defenseless population. The arms were taken from arms that the U.S. stores in Israel; they’re pre-positioned in Israel for eventual use by U.S. forces. That’s one part of the U.S.-Israel strategic alliance. That’s one small part of it, is that Israel is regarded as essentially an offshore military base. So we store, pre-position arms there, and some of those arms were transferred to Israeli control so that they could complete—continue the massive destruction of Gaza, which is horrific and one of many indications of the nature of the alliance.

It’s a very close alliance, and deep enough—so, for example, one of the interesting leaks from WikiLeaks was a U.S. government study of—a Pentagon study of sites in the world that are of such high significance that we must protect them at all costs. One of them was right near Haifa. It was the Rafael military industries. It’s one of the main producers of drones and other high-tech military equipment. And the relation—and that’s one of the highest—strategic sites of highest importance. And, in fact, the relationship is so close that Rafael actually transferred its management offices to Washington, where the money is and the contacts are. It’s essentially an offshore military base, in many ways, also a major source for U.S. investment, high-tech investment. So, Intel, for example, is setting up its major new facility for next-generation chips in Israel. Warren Buffett just bought a big Israeli company. There are many very close relationships, and they’re not going to be affecting by a personal conflict between Baker and Shamir or Obama and Netanyahu.

AMYGOODMAN: And the Obama administration has taken great pains, even as this division has taken place, to show its support for Israel. On Sunday, Secretary of State John Kerry said the U.S. has intervened on Israel’s behalf hundreds of times in the international arena.

SECRETARY OF STATEJOHNKERRY: Prime minister of Israel is welcome to speak in the United States, obviously, and we have a closer relationship with Israel right now in terms of security than at any time in history. I was reviewing the record the other day. We have intervened on Israel’s behalf in the last two years more than several hundred—a couple of hundred times in over 75 different fora in order to protect Israel.

AMYGOODMAN: That was U.S. secretary of state on ABC’s This Week. Noam Chomsky?

NOAMCHOMSKY: And it’s interesting to look at the cases. The most—one of them actually received a fair amount of publicity, because it was so remarkable. That was, I suppose, February 2011, roughly, at the U.N. Security Council. There was a resolution proposed at the Security Council calling on Israel to abide by official U.S. policy. The official U.S. policy is objection to settlement expansion. It’s a pretty minor issue, incidentally. That’s what’s talked about. But the issue is the settlements, not the expansion. They’re all illegal. They’re criminal activities. They undermine any hope for any peaceful settlement. But U.S. policy is that settlement expansion is, as they put it, not helpful to peace. The Security Council proposed a resolution asking Israel to abide by official U.S. policy. Obama vetoed it. You know, that’s real support for Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in the United States as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran during a controversial speech before the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Dozens of Democrats are threatening to boycott the address, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. Netanyahu’s visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the United States, are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31 deadline. "For both Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran," says Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They have a common interest in ensuring there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region." Chomsky also responds to recent revelations that in 2012 the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, contradicted Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb, concluding that Iran was "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in Washington as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu will address the lobby group AIPAC today, followed by a controversial speech before Congress on Tuesday. The visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31st deadline. At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Netanyahu’s trip won’t threaten the outcome.

PRESS SECRETARY JOSH EARNEST: I think the short answer to that is: I don’t think so. And the reason is simply that there is a real opportunity for us here. And the president is hopeful that we are going to have an opportunity to do what is clearly in the best interests of the United States and Israel, which is to resolve the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program at the negotiating table.

AARON MATÉ: The trip has sparked the worst public rift between the U.S. and Israel in over two decades. Dozens of Democrats could boycott Netanyahu’s address to Congress, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. The Obama administration will send two officials, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, to address the AIPAC summit today. This comes just days after Rice called Netanyahu’s visit, quote, "destructive."

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also facing domestic criticism for his unconventional Washington visit, which comes just two weeks before an election in which he seeks a third term in Israel. On Sunday, a group representing nearly 200 of Israel’s top retired military and intelligence officials accused Netanyahu of assaulting the U.S.-Israel alliance.

But despite talk of a U.S. and Israeli dispute, the Obama administration has taken pains to display its staunch support for the Israeli government. Speaking just today in Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry blasted the U.N. Human Rights Council for what he called an "obsession" and "bias" against Israel. The council is expected to release a report in the coming weeks on potential war crimes in Israel’s U.S.-backed Gaza assault last summer.

For more, we spend the hour today with world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, Noam Chomsky. He has written over a hundred books, most recently On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Ilan Pappé, is titled On Palestine and will be out next month. Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than 50 years.

Noam Chomsky, it’s great to have you back here at Democracy Now!, and particularly in our very snowy outside, but warm inside, New York studio.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Delighted to be here again.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Noam, let’s start with Netanyahu’s visit. He is set to make this unprecedented joint address to Congress, unprecedented because of the kind of rift it has demonstrated between the Republicans and the Democratic president, President Obama. Can you talk about its significance?

NOAM CHOMSKY: For both president—Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran. They have a common interest in ensuring that there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region. And it is—if we believe U.S. intelligence—don’t see any reason not to—their analysis is that if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, which they don’t know, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. Now, their general strategic posture is one of deterrence. They have low military expenditures. According to U.S. intelligence, their strategic doctrine is to try to prevent an attack, up to the point where diplomacy can set in. I don’t think anyone with a grey cell functioning thinks that they would ever conceivably use a nuclear weapon, or even try to. The country would be obliterated in 15 seconds. But they might provide a deterrent of sorts. And the U.S. and Israel certainly don’t want to tolerate that. They are the forces that carry out regular violence and aggression in the region and don’t want any impediment to that.

And for the Republicans in Congress, there’s another interest—namely, to undermine anything that Obama, you know, the Antichrist, might try to do. So that’s a separate issue there. The Republicans stopped being an ordinary parliamentary party some years ago. They were described, I think accurately, by Norman Ornstein, the very respected conservative political analyst, American Enterprise Institute; he said the party has become a radical insurgency which has abandoned any commitment to parliamentary democracy. And their goal for the last years has simply been to undermine anything that Obama might do, in an effort to regain power and serve their primary constituency, which is the very wealthy and the corporate sector. They try to conceal this with all sorts of other means. In doing so, they’ve had to—you can’t get votes that way, so they’ve had to mobilize sectors of the population which have always been there but were never mobilized into an organized political force: evangelical Christians, extreme nationalists, terrified people who have to carry guns into Starbucks because somebody might be after them, and so on and so forth. That’s a big force. And inspiring fear is not very difficult in the United States. It’s a long history, back to colonial times, of—as an extremely frightened society, which is an interesting story in itself. And mobilizing people in fear of them, whoever "them" happens to be, is an effective technique used over and over again. And right now, the Republicans have—their nonpolicy has succeeded in putting them back in a position of at least congressional power. So, the attack on—this is a personal attack on Obama, and intended that way, is simply part of that general effort. But there is a common strategic concern underlying it, I think, and that is pretty much what U.S. intelligence analyzes: preventing any deterrent in the region to U.S. and Israeli actions.

AARON MATÉ: You say that nobody with a grey cell thinks that Iran would launch a strike, were it to have nuclear weapons, but yet Netanyahu repeatedly accuses Iran of planning a new genocide against the Jewish people. He said this most recently on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, saying that the ayatollahs are planning a new holocaust against us. And that’s an argument that’s taken seriously here.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s taken seriously by people who don’t stop to think for a minute. But again, Iran is under extremely close surveillance. U.S. satellite surveillance knows everything that’s going on in Iran. If Iran even began to load a missile—that is, to bring a missile near a weapon—the country would probably be wiped out. And whatever you think about the clerics, the Guardian Council and so on, there’s no indication that they’re suicidal.

AARON MATÉ: The premise of these talks—Iran gets to enrich uranium in return for lifting of U.S. sanctions—do you see that as a fair parameter? Does the U.S. have the right, to begin with, to be imposing sanctions on Iran?

NOAM CHOMSKY: No, it doesn’t. What are the right to impose sanctions? Iran should be imposing sanctions on us. I mean, it’s worth remembering—when you hear the White House spokesman talk about the international community, it wants Iran to do this and that, it’s important to remember that the phrase "international community" in U.S. discourse refers to the United States and anybody who may be happening to go along with it. That’s the international community. If the international community is the world, it’s quite a different story. So, two years ago, the Non-Aligned—former Non-Aligned Movement—it’s a large majority of the population of the world—had their regular conference in Iran in Tehran. And they, once again, vigorously supported Iran’s right to develop nuclear power as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s the international community. The United States and its allies are outliers, as is usually the case.

And as far as sanctions are concerned, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s now 60 years since—during the past 60 years, not a day has passed without the U.S. torturing the people of Iran. It began with overthrowing the parliamentary regime and installing a tyrant, the shah, supporting the shah through very serious human rights abuses and terror and violence. As soon as he was overthrown, almost instantly the United States turned to supporting Iraq’s attack against Iran, which was a brutal and violent attack. U.S. provided critical support for it, pretty much won the war for Iraq by entering directly at the end. After the war was over, the U.S. instantly supported the sanctions against Iran. And though this is kind of suppressed, it’s important. This is George H.W. Bush now. He was in love with Saddam Hussein. He authorized further aid to Saddam in opposition to the Treasury and others. He sent a presidential delegation—a congressional delegation to Iran. It was April 1990—1989, headed by Bob Dole, the congressional—

AMY GOODMAN: To Iraq? Sent to Iraq?

NOAM CHOMSKY: To Iraq. To Iraq, sorry, yeah—to offer his greetings to Saddam, his friend, to assure him that he should disregard critical comment that he hears in the American media: We have this free press thing here, and we can’t shut them up. But they said they would take off from Voice of America, take off critics of their friend Saddam. That was—he invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production. This is right after the Iraq-Iran War, along with sanctions against Iran. And then it continues without a break up to the present.

There have been repeated opportunities for a settlement of whatever the issues are. And so, for example, in, I guess it was, 2010, an agreement was reached between Brazil, Turkey and Iran for Iran to ship out its low-enriched uranium for storage elsewhere—Turkey—and in return, the West would provide the isotopes that Iran needs for its medical reactors. When that agreement was reached, it was bitterly condemned in the United States by the president, by Congress, by the media. Brazil was attacked for breaking ranks and so on. The Brazilian foreign minister was sufficiently annoyed so that he released a letter from Obama to Brazil proposing exactly that agreement, presumably on the assumption that Iran wouldn’t accept it. When they did accept it, they had to be attacked for daring to accept it.

And 2012, 2012, you know, there was to be a meeting in Finland, December, to take steps towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. This is an old request, pushed initially by Egypt and the other Arab states back in the early '90s. There's so much support for it that the U.S. formally agrees, but not in fact, and has repeatedly tried to undermine it. This is under the U.N. auspices, and the meeting was supposed to take place in December. Israel announced that they would not attend. The question on everyone’s mind is: How will Iran react? They said that they would attend unconditionally. A couple of days later, Obama canceled the meeting, claiming the situation is not right for it and so on. But that would be—even steps in that direction would be an important move towards eliminating whatever issue there might be. Of course, the stumbling block is that there is one major nuclear state: Israel. And if there’s a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone, there would be inspections, and neither Israel nor the United States will tolerate that.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about major revelations that have been described as the biggest leak since Edward Snowden. Last week, Al Jazeera started publishing a series of spy cables from the world’s top intelligence agencies. In one cable, the Israeli spy agency Mossad contradicts Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb within a year. In a report to South African counterparts in October 2012, the Israeli Mossad concluded Iran is "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons." The assessment was sent just weeks after Netanyahu went before the U.N. General Assembly with a far different message. Netanyahu held up a cartoonish diagram of a bomb with a fuse to illustrate what he called Iran’s alleged progress on a nuclear weapon.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: This is a bomb. This is a fuse. In the case of Iran’s nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages. By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should be drawn right here, before—before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2012. The Mossad assessment contradicting Netanyahu was sent just weeks after, but it was likely written earlier. It said Iran, quote, "does not appear to be ready," unquote, to enrich uranium to the highest levels needed for a nuclear weapon. A bomb would require 90 percent enrichment, but Mossad found Iran had only enriched to 20 percent. That number was later reduced under an interim nuclear deal the following year. The significance of this, Noam Chomsky, as Prime Minister Netanyahu prepares for this joint address before Congress to undermine a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the striking aspect of this is the chutzpah involved. I mean, Israel has had nuclear weapons for probably 50 years or 40 years. They have, estimates are, maybe 100, 200 nuclear weapons. And they are an aggressive state. Israel has invaded Lebanon five times. It’s carrying out an illegal occupation that carries out brutal attacks like Gaza last summer. And they have nuclear weapons. But the main story is that if—incidentally, the Mossad analysis corresponds to U.S. intelligence analysis. They don’t know if Iran is developing nuclear weapons. But I think the crucial fact is that even if they were, what would it mean? It would be just as U.S. intelligence analyzes it: It would be part of a deterrent strategy. They couldn’t use a nuclear weapon. They couldn’t even threaten to use it. Israel, on the other hand, can; has, in fact, threatened the use of nuclear weapons a number of times.

AMY GOODMAN: So why is Netanyahu doing this?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Because he doesn’t want to have a deterrent in the region. That’s simple enough. If you’re an aggressive, violent state, you want to be able to use force freely. You don’t want anything that might impede it.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think this in any way has undercut the U.S. relationship with Israel, the Netanyahu-Obama conflict that, what, Susan Rice has called destructive?

NOAM CHOMSKY: There is undoubtedly a personal relationship which is hostile, but that’s happened before. Back in around 1990 under first President Bush, James Baker went as far as—the secretary of state—telling Israel, "We’re not going to talk to you anymore. If you want to contact me, here’s my phone number." And, in fact, the U.S. imposed mild sanctions on Israel, enough to compel the prime minister to resign and be replaced by someone else. But that didn’t change the relationship, which is based on deeper issues than personal antagonisms.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in the United States as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran during a controversial speech before the U.S. Congress on Tuesday. Dozens of Democrats are threatening to boycott the address, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. Netanyahu’s visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the United States, are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31 deadline. "For both Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran," says Noam Chomsky, institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "They have a common interest in ensuring there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region." Chomsky also responds to recent revelations that in 2012 the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, contradicted Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb, concluding that Iran was "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons."

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AARON MATÉ: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has arrived in Washington as part of his bid to stop a nuclear deal with Iran. Netanyahu will address the lobby group AIPAC today, followed by a controversial speech before Congress on Tuesday. The visit comes just as Iran and six world powers, including the U.S., are set to resume talks in a bid to meet a March 31st deadline. At the White House, Press Secretary Josh Earnest said Netanyahu’s trip won’t threaten the outcome.

PRESS SECRETARY JOSH EARNEST: I think the short answer to that is: I don’t think so. And the reason is simply that there is a real opportunity for us here. And the president is hopeful that we are going to have an opportunity to do what is clearly in the best interests of the United States and Israel, which is to resolve the international community’s concerns about Iran’s nuclear program at the negotiating table.

AARON MATÉ: The trip has sparked the worst public rift between the U.S. and Israel in over two decades. Dozens of Democrats could boycott Netanyahu’s address to Congress, which was arranged by House Speaker John Boehner without consulting the White House. The Obama administration will send two officials, National Security Adviser Susan Rice and U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power, to address the AIPAC summit today. This comes just days after Rice called Netanyahu’s visit, quote, "destructive."

AMY GOODMAN: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also facing domestic criticism for his unconventional Washington visit, which comes just two weeks before an election in which he seeks a third term in Israel. On Sunday, a group representing nearly 200 of Israel’s top retired military and intelligence officials accused Netanyahu of assaulting the U.S.-Israel alliance.

But despite talk of a U.S. and Israeli dispute, the Obama administration has taken pains to display its staunch support for the Israeli government. Speaking just today in Geneva, Secretary of State John Kerry blasted the U.N. Human Rights Council for what he called an "obsession" and "bias" against Israel. The council is expected to release a report in the coming weeks on potential war crimes in Israel’s U.S.-backed Gaza assault last summer.

For more, we spend the hour today with world-renowned political dissident, linguist, author, Noam Chomsky. He has written over a hundred books, most recently On Western Terrorism: From Hiroshima to Drone Warfare. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Ilan Pappé, is titled On Palestine and will be out next month. Noam Chomsky is institute professor emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he’s taught for more than 50 years.

Noam Chomsky, it’s great to have you back here at Democracy Now!, and particularly in our very snowy outside, but warm inside, New York studio.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Delighted to be here again.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Noam, let’s start with Netanyahu’s visit. He is set to make this unprecedented joint address to Congress, unprecedented because of the kind of rift it has demonstrated between the Republicans and the Democratic president, President Obama. Can you talk about its significance?

NOAM CHOMSKY: For both president—Prime Minister Netanyahu and the hawks in Congress, mostly Republican, the primary goal is to undermine any potential negotiation that might settle whatever issue there is with Iran. They have a common interest in ensuring that there is no regional force that can serve as any kind of deterrent to Israeli and U.S. violence, the major violence in the region. And it is—if we believe U.S. intelligence—don’t see any reason not to—their analysis is that if Iran is developing nuclear weapons, which they don’t know, it would be part of their deterrent strategy. Now, their general strategic posture is one of deterrence. They have low military expenditures. According to U.S. intelligence, their strategic doctrine is to try to prevent an attack, up to the point where diplomacy can set in. I don’t think anyone with a grey cell functioning thinks that they would ever conceivably use a nuclear weapon, or even try to. The country would be obliterated in 15 seconds. But they might provide a deterrent of sorts. And the U.S. and Israel certainly don’t want to tolerate that. They are the forces that carry out regular violence and aggression in the region and don’t want any impediment to that.

And for the Republicans in Congress, there’s another interest—namely, to undermine anything that Obama, you know, the Antichrist, might try to do. So that’s a separate issue there. The Republicans stopped being an ordinary parliamentary party some years ago. They were described, I think accurately, by Norman Ornstein, the very respected conservative political analyst, American Enterprise Institute; he said the party has become a radical insurgency which has abandoned any commitment to parliamentary democracy. And their goal for the last years has simply been to undermine anything that Obama might do, in an effort to regain power and serve their primary constituency, which is the very wealthy and the corporate sector. They try to conceal this with all sorts of other means. In doing so, they’ve had to—you can’t get votes that way, so they’ve had to mobilize sectors of the population which have always been there but were never mobilized into an organized political force: evangelical Christians, extreme nationalists, terrified people who have to carry guns into Starbucks because somebody might be after them, and so on and so forth. That’s a big force. And inspiring fear is not very difficult in the United States. It’s a long history, back to colonial times, of—as an extremely frightened society, which is an interesting story in itself. And mobilizing people in fear of them, whoever "them" happens to be, is an effective technique used over and over again. And right now, the Republicans have—their nonpolicy has succeeded in putting them back in a position of at least congressional power. So, the attack on—this is a personal attack on Obama, and intended that way, is simply part of that general effort. But there is a common strategic concern underlying it, I think, and that is pretty much what U.S. intelligence analyzes: preventing any deterrent in the region to U.S. and Israeli actions.

AARON MATÉ: You say that nobody with a grey cell thinks that Iran would launch a strike, were it to have nuclear weapons, but yet Netanyahu repeatedly accuses Iran of planning a new genocide against the Jewish people. He said this most recently on Holocaust Remembrance Day in January, saying that the ayatollahs are planning a new holocaust against us. And that’s an argument that’s taken seriously here.

NOAM CHOMSKY: It’s taken seriously by people who don’t stop to think for a minute. But again, Iran is under extremely close surveillance. U.S. satellite surveillance knows everything that’s going on in Iran. If Iran even began to load a missile—that is, to bring a missile near a weapon—the country would probably be wiped out. And whatever you think about the clerics, the Guardian Council and so on, there’s no indication that they’re suicidal.

AARON MATÉ: The premise of these talks—Iran gets to enrich uranium in return for lifting of U.S. sanctions—do you see that as a fair parameter? Does the U.S. have the right, to begin with, to be imposing sanctions on Iran?

NOAM CHOMSKY: No, it doesn’t. What are the right to impose sanctions? Iran should be imposing sanctions on us. I mean, it’s worth remembering—when you hear the White House spokesman talk about the international community, it wants Iran to do this and that, it’s important to remember that the phrase "international community" in U.S. discourse refers to the United States and anybody who may be happening to go along with it. That’s the international community. If the international community is the world, it’s quite a different story. So, two years ago, the Non-Aligned—former Non-Aligned Movement—it’s a large majority of the population of the world—had their regular conference in Iran in Tehran. And they, once again, vigorously supported Iran’s right to develop nuclear power as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That’s the international community. The United States and its allies are outliers, as is usually the case.

And as far as sanctions are concerned, it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s now 60 years since—during the past 60 years, not a day has passed without the U.S. torturing the people of Iran. It began with overthrowing the parliamentary regime and installing a tyrant, the shah, supporting the shah through very serious human rights abuses and terror and violence. As soon as he was overthrown, almost instantly the United States turned to supporting Iraq’s attack against Iran, which was a brutal and violent attack. U.S. provided critical support for it, pretty much won the war for Iraq by entering directly at the end. After the war was over, the U.S. instantly supported the sanctions against Iran. And though this is kind of suppressed, it’s important. This is George H.W. Bush now. He was in love with Saddam Hussein. He authorized further aid to Saddam in opposition to the Treasury and others. He sent a presidential delegation—a congressional delegation to Iran. It was April 1990—1989, headed by Bob Dole, the congressional—

AMY GOODMAN: To Iraq? Sent to Iraq?

NOAM CHOMSKY: To Iraq. To Iraq, sorry, yeah—to offer his greetings to Saddam, his friend, to assure him that he should disregard critical comment that he hears in the American media: We have this free press thing here, and we can’t shut them up. But they said they would take off from Voice of America, take off critics of their friend Saddam. That was—he invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in weapons production. This is right after the Iraq-Iran War, along with sanctions against Iran. And then it continues without a break up to the present.

There have been repeated opportunities for a settlement of whatever the issues are. And so, for example, in, I guess it was, 2010, an agreement was reached between Brazil, Turkey and Iran for Iran to ship out its low-enriched uranium for storage elsewhere—Turkey—and in return, the West would provide the isotopes that Iran needs for its medical reactors. When that agreement was reached, it was bitterly condemned in the United States by the president, by Congress, by the media. Brazil was attacked for breaking ranks and so on. The Brazilian foreign minister was sufficiently annoyed so that he released a letter from Obama to Brazil proposing exactly that agreement, presumably on the assumption that Iran wouldn’t accept it. When they did accept it, they had to be attacked for daring to accept it.

And 2012, 2012, you know, there was to be a meeting in Finland, December, to take steps towards establishing a nuclear weapons-free zone in the region. This is an old request, pushed initially by Egypt and the other Arab states back in the early '90s. There's so much support for it that the U.S. formally agrees, but not in fact, and has repeatedly tried to undermine it. This is under the U.N. auspices, and the meeting was supposed to take place in December. Israel announced that they would not attend. The question on everyone’s mind is: How will Iran react? They said that they would attend unconditionally. A couple of days later, Obama canceled the meeting, claiming the situation is not right for it and so on. But that would be—even steps in that direction would be an important move towards eliminating whatever issue there might be. Of course, the stumbling block is that there is one major nuclear state: Israel. And if there’s a Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone, there would be inspections, and neither Israel nor the United States will tolerate that.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about major revelations that have been described as the biggest leak since Edward Snowden. Last week, Al Jazeera started publishing a series of spy cables from the world’s top intelligence agencies. In one cable, the Israeli spy agency Mossad contradicts Prime Minister Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb within a year. In a report to South African counterparts in October 2012, the Israeli Mossad concluded Iran is "not performing the activity necessary to produce weapons." The assessment was sent just weeks after Netanyahu went before the U.N. General Assembly with a far different message. Netanyahu held up a cartoonish diagram of a bomb with a fuse to illustrate what he called Iran’s alleged progress on a nuclear weapon.

PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: This is a bomb. This is a fuse. In the case of Iran’s nuclear plans to build a bomb, this bomb has to be filled with enough enriched uranium. And Iran has to go through three stages. By next spring, at most by next summer, at current enrichment rates, they will have finished the medium enrichment and move on to the final stage. From there, it’s only a few months, possibly a few weeks, before they get enough enriched uranium for the first bomb. A red line should be drawn right here, before—before Iran completes the second stage of nuclear enrichment necessary to make a bomb.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in September 2012. The Mossad assessment contradicting Netanyahu was sent just weeks after, but it was likely written earlier. It said Iran, quote, "does not appear to be ready," unquote, to enrich uranium to the highest levels needed for a nuclear weapon. A bomb would require 90 percent enrichment, but Mossad found Iran had only enriched to 20 percent. That number was later reduced under an interim nuclear deal the following year. The significance of this, Noam Chomsky, as Prime Minister Netanyahu prepares for this joint address before Congress to undermine a U.S.-Iranian nuclear deal?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, the striking aspect of this is the chutzpah involved. I mean, Israel has had nuclear weapons for probably 50 years or 40 years. They have, estimates are, maybe 100, 200 nuclear weapons. And they are an aggressive state. Israel has invaded Lebanon five times. It’s carrying out an illegal occupation that carries out brutal attacks like Gaza last summer. And they have nuclear weapons. But the main story is that if—incidentally, the Mossad analysis corresponds to U.S. intelligence analysis. They don’t know if Iran is developing nuclear weapons. But I think the crucial fact is that even if they were, what would it mean? It would be just as U.S. intelligence analyzes it: It would be part of a deterrent strategy. They couldn’t use a nuclear weapon. They couldn’t even threaten to use it. Israel, on the other hand, can; has, in fact, threatened the use of nuclear weapons a number of times.

AMY GOODMAN: So why is Netanyahu doing this?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Because he doesn’t want to have a deterrent in the region. That’s simple enough. If you’re an aggressive, violent state, you want to be able to use force freely. You don’t want anything that might impede it.

AMY GOODMAN: Do you think this in any way has undercut the U.S. relationship with Israel, the Netanyahu-Obama conflict that, what, Susan Rice has called destructive?

NOAM CHOMSKY: There is undoubtedly a personal relationship which is hostile, but that’s happened before. Back in around 1990 under first President Bush, James Baker went as far as—the secretary of state—telling Israel, "We’re not going to talk to you anymore. If you want to contact me, here’s my phone number." And, in fact, the U.S. imposed mild sanctions on Israel, enough to compel the prime minister to resign and be replaced by someone else. But that didn’t change the relationship, which is based on deeper issues than personal antagonisms.

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http://www.alternet.org/world/10-things-america-must-do-stop-ruining-world10 Things America Must Do to Stop Ruining the Worldhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/86228918/0/alternet_world~Things-America-Must-Do-to-Stop-Ruining-the-World

My letter to an unknown American patriot.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

Dear American Patriot,

I wish I knew your name. I’ve been thinking about you, about all of us actually and our country, and meaning to write for a while to explain myself. Let me start this way: you should feel free to call me an American nationalist. It may sound ugly as hell, but it’s one way I do think of myself. True, we Americans usually reserve the more kindly word “patriot” for ourselves and use “nationalist” to diss other people who exhibit special feeling for their country. In the extreme, it’s “superpatriot” for us and “ultranationalist” for them.

In any case, here’s how my particular form of nationalism manifests itself. I feel a responsibility for the acts of this country that I don’t feel for those of other states or groups. When, for instance, a wedding party blows up thanks to a Taliban roadside bomb, or the Islamic State cuts some poor captive’s head off, or Bashar al-Assad’s air force drops barrel bombs on civilians, or the Russians jail a political activist, or some other group or state commits some similar set of crimes, I’m not surprised. Human barbarity, as well as the arbitrary cruelty of state power, are unending facts of history. They should be opposed, but am I shocked? No.

Still -- and I accept the irrationality of this -- when my country wipes out wedding parties in other lands or organizes torture regimes and offshore prison systems where anything goes, or tries to jail yet another whistleblower, when it acts cruelly, arbitrarily, or barbarically, I feel shock and wonder why more Americans don’t have the same reaction.

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t blame myself for the commission of such acts, but as an American, I do feel a special responsibility to do something about them, or at least to speak out against them -- as it should be the responsibility of others in their localities to deal with their particular sets of barbarians.

So think of my last 12 years running TomDispatch.com as my own modest war on terror -- American terror. We don’t, of course, like to think of ourselves as barbaric, and terror is, almost by definition, a set of un-American acts that others are eager to commit against us. “They” want to take us out in our malls and backyards. We would never commit such acts, not knowingly, not with malice aforethought. It matters little here that, from wedding partiesto funerals, women to children, we have, in fact, continued to take “them” out in their backyards quite regularly.

Most Americans would admit that this country makes mistakes. Despite our best efforts, we do sometimes produce what we like to call “collateral damage” as we go after the evildoers, but a terror regime? Not us. Never.

And this is part of the reason I’m writing you. I keep wondering how, in these years, it’s been possible to hold onto such fictions so successfully. I wonder why, at least some of the time, you aren’t jumping out of your skin over what we do, rather than what they’ve done or might prospectively do to us.

Let’s start with an uncomfortable fact of our world that few here care to mention: in one way or another, Washington has been complicit in the creation or strengthening of just about every extreme terror outfit across the Greater Middle East. If we weren’t their parents, in crucial cases we were at least their midwives or foster parents.

Start in the 1980s with the urge of President Ronald Reagan and his fundamentalist Catholic spymaster, CIA Director William Casey, to make allies of fundamentalist Islamic movements at a time when their extreme (and extremist) piety seemed attractively anticommunist. In that decade, in Afghanistan in particular, Reagan and Casey put money, arms, and training where their hearts and mouths were and promoted the most extreme Islamists who were ready to give the Soviet Union a bloody nose, a Vietnam in reverse.

To accomplish this, Washington also allied itself with an extreme religious state, Saudi Arabia, as well as Pakistan’s less than savory intelligence service. The result was major support for men -- President Reagan hailed them as “freedom fighters” and said of a visiting group of them in 1985, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers" -- some of whom are now fighting us in Afghanistan, and indirectly for what came to be known as al-Qaeda, an organization which emerged from the American-Saudi hothouse of the Afghan War. The rest, as they say, is history.

Similarly, American fingerprints are all over the new Islamic State (IS) or “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria. Its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, came into existence in the chaos and civil strife that followed the American invasion and occupation of that country, after Saddam Hussein’s military had been disbanded and hundreds of thousands of trained Sunni personnel tossed out onto the streets of Iraq’s cities. Much of the leadership of the Islamic State met, grew close, and trained potential recruits at Camp Bucca, an American military prison in Iraq. Without the acts of the Bush administration, IS would, in fact, have been inconceivable. In the same fashion, the U.S. (and NATO) intervention in Libya in 2011, including a seven-monthbombing campaign, helped create the conditions for the growth of extreme militias in parts of that country, as the U.S. drone assassination campaign in Yemen has visibly strengthened al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

In other words, each of the terror organizations we categorize as the unimaginably barbaric Other has a curiously intimate, if generally unexplored, relationship with us. In addition, in these years, it’s been clear (at least to those living in the Greater Middle East) that such groups had no monopoly on barbarity. Washington’s extreme acts were legion in the region, ranging from its CIA torture chambers (although we called them “black sites”) to Abu Ghraib, from global kidnappings to images of a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians in the streets of Baghdad. There were also a range of well-publicized vengeful acts of war, including videos of U.S. troops laughing while urinating on enemy corpses, trophy photos of body parts taken by American soldiers as souvenirs, photos of a 12-member “kill team” that hunted Afghans “for sport,” and a striking “lone wolf” nighttime terror rampage by an American staff sergeant in Afghanistan who killed 16 villagers, mainly women and children. And that’s just for starters.

Then there’s one matter that TomDispatch has been alone here in focusing on. By my count, American airpower has blown away parts or all of at least eight wedding parties in three countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen), killing at least several hundred revelers over the years, without the slightest shock or upset in the U.S.

That’s one reason I’m writing you: the lack of reaction here. Can you imagine what would happen if the planes and drones from another country had wiped out eight weddings here in perhaps a dozen years?

On a larger scale, Washington’s invasions, occupations, interventions, bombings, and raids since 9/11 have resulted in a rising tide of civilian deaths and exiles in a fragmenting region. All of this, including those drone assassination campaigns in the backlands of the planet, adds up to a panorama of barbarism and terror that we seldom acknowledge as such. Of course, the terror outfits we love to hate also love to hate us and have often leapt to embrace the extremity of our acts, including adopting both the orange jumpsuits of Guantánamo and the CIA’s waterboarding for their own symbolic purposes.

Perhaps above all, Americans don’t imagine drones, the sexiesthigh-tech weapons around, as purveyors of terror. Yet our grimly named Predators and Reapers armed with “Hellfire” missiles, their pilots safe from harm thousands of miles away, buzz daily over the Pakistani tribal backlands and rural Yemenspreading terror below. That this is so should be indisputable, at least based on accounts from the ground.

In fact, Washington’s drone assassins might fit into a category we normally only apply to Them: “lone wolf” terrorists searching for targets to blow away. In our case, it’s people who have what Washington identifies as behavioral “traits” associated with terror suspects. They are eliminated in “signature strikes.” So here’s my question to you: Why is it that Americans generally don’t grasp the impact of such a new form of warfare in the Islamic world, especially when, at the movies (as in the Terminator films), we usually root against the machines and for the humans scurrying underfoot? The word American drone operators use to label their dead victims -- “bugsplat” -- reveals much. The term goes back at least to the non-drone shock-and-awe air attacks that began the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and reflects a disturbing sense of God-like, all-seeing power over the “insects” below.

Of course, part of the reason so little of this sinks in here is that all such acts, no matter how extreme, have been folded into a single comforting framework. You know the one I mean: the need for the national security state to keep Americans “safe” from terror. I think you’d agree that, by now, this is a sacrosanct principle of the post-9/11 era that's helped expand the national security state to a size unimaginable even in the Cold War years when this country had another imperial enemy.

Safety and security are much abused terms in our American world. The attacks of 9/11 created what might be thought of as a national version of PTSD from which we’ve never recovered, and yet the dangers of Islamic terrorism, while perfectly real, are relatively minor. Leave aside the truly threatening things in American life and take instead an obscure example of what I mean. Even the most modest research suggests that toddlers who find guns may kill or wound more Americans in a typical year than terrorists do. And yet the media deals with death-by-toddler as an oddity story, not a national crisis, whether the result is the death of a mother in a Wal-Mart in Idaho or the wounding of a father and mother in anAlbuquerque motel. Nor does the government regularly hype the dangers of “lone wolf” toddlers. And despite such killings, the legality of “carrying” guns (for “safety” -- of course! -- from unspecified non-toddler bad guys) is barely questioned in this country as the practice spreads rapidly both in numbers and in the kinds of places to which such weapons can be brought.

And don’t even waste your time thinking about the more than 30,000 deaths by vehicle each year. Americans coexist with such spectacular levels of carnage without significant complaint so that car culture can continue in the usual fashion. Yet let some distant terror group issue an absurd threat by video -- most recently, al-Shabab in Somalia warning of an attack on the Mall of America in Minnesota -- and the media alarm bells go off; the government issues warnings; the head of the Department of Homeland Security (worrying about his budget tied up in Congress) takes to TV to warn shoppers to be “particularly careful”; and pundits debate just how serious this danger may be. Forget that the only thing al-Shabab can hope for is that a disturbed doofus living somewhere in Minnesota might pick up one of the guns floating so freely around this society and head for that mall to do his damnedest.

And in the constant panic over our safety in situations where very little danger actually exists, our own barbarity, seen as a series of defensive acts to ensure our security, disappears in a sea of alarm.

So how to respond? I doubt you agree with me this far, so my response probably carries little weight with you. Nonetheless, let me offer it, with a caveat of sorts. Despite what you might imagine, I’m neither a pacifist, nor do I believe in a perfect world. And no, I wouldn’t disband the U.S. military. It’s clear enough that a strong, defensive-minded military is a necessity on this planet.

After 13 years, though, it should be obvious that this country’s military-first policies throughout the Greater Middle East and widening areas of Africa have been a disastrous bust. I have no doubt that a far less barbaric, less extreme, less militaristic foreign policy would, in purely pragmatic terms, also be a more effective one on every imaginable score -- unless, of course, your value system happens to center on the continued building up of the national security state and the reinforcement of its “security” or of the military-industrial complex andits “security.” In that case, the necessity for our barbarity as well as theirs becomes clearer in a flash.

Otherwise, despite much that we’ve heard in this new century, my suspicion is that what's right and moral is also what's practical and realistic. In that light, let me offer, with commentary, my version of the Ten Commandments for a better American world (and a better world generally). Admittedly, in this day and age, it could easily be the Twenty or Thirty Commandments, but being classically minded, let me just stick with 10.

1. Thou shalt not torture: Torture of every horrific sort in these years seems to have beenremarkably ineffective in producing useful information for the state. Even if it were provedeffective in breaking up al-Qaeda plots, however, it would still have been both a desperately illegal (if unpunished) act and a foreign policy disaster of the first order.

2. Thou shalt not send drones to assassinate anyone, American or not: The ongoing U.S. drone assassination campaigns, while killing individual terrorists, have driven significant numbers of people in the backlands of the planet into the arms of terror outfits and so only increased their size and appeal. Without a doubt, such drone strikes represent a global war of, not on, terror. In the process, they have turned the president into our assassin-in-chief and us into an assassin nation.

3. Thou shalt not invade another country: D'oh!

4. Thou shalt not occupy another country: By the way, how did that work out the last two times the U.S. tried it?

5. Thou shalt not upgrade thy nuclear arsenal: The U.S. has now committed itself to atrillion-dollar, decades-long upgrade of its vast arsenal. If any significant portion of it were ever used, it would end human life as we know it on this planet and so should be considered a singular prospective crime against humanity. After years in which the only American nuclear focus was on a country -- Iran -- with no nuclear weapons, that this has happened without serious debate or discussion is in itself criminal.

6.Thou shalt not intercept the communications of thy citizens or others all over the world or pursue the elaboration of a global surveillance state based on criminal acts: There seems to be no place the NSA has been unwilling to break into in order to surveil the planet. For unimaginable reams of information that have seemingly been of next to no actual use, the NSA and the national security state have essentially outlawed privacy and cracked open various amendments to the Constitution. No information is worth such a price.

7. Thou shalt not be free of punishment for crimes of state: In these years of genuine criminality, official Washington has become a crime-free zone. No matter the seriousness of the act, none -- not one committed in the name of the state in the post-9/11 era, no matter how heinous -- has been brought into a courtroom.

8. Thou shalt not use a massive system of secret classification to deprive Americans of all real knowledge of acts of state: In 2011, the U.S. classified 92 million documents and the shroud of secrecy over the business of the “people’s” government has only grown worse in the years since. Increasingly, for our own “safety” we are only supposed to know what the government prefers us to know. This represents, of course, a crime against democracy.

9. Thou shalt not act punitively toward those who want to let Americans in on what the national security state is doing in their name: The fierce and draconian campaign the Obama administration has launched against leakers and whistleblowers is unprecedented in our history. It is a growing challenge to freedom of the press and to the citizen’s right to know.

10. Thou shalt not infringe on the rights of the citizenry to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: Need I even explain?

If you want to boil these commandments down to a single injunction, it might simply be: Don’t do it! Or in a moment when nothing Washington does isn’t, it seems, done again: Stop and think before acting!

Of course, there’s no way to know what a national security policy based on these 10 commandments might really be like, not when Washington is so thoroughly invested in repeating its failed acts. It’s now deep into Iraq War 3.0, intent on further slowing the “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, and pursuing the usual drone assassination strategies, as from South Asia to Iraq, Yemen, and Libya things only worsen and jihadist organizationsgrow stronger.

Yet campaign 2016 is already shaping up as a contest among candidates who represent more of the same, much more of the same, and even more than that of the same. One of them has tellingly brought back as his advisers much of the cast of characters who planned the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Even if the above commandments weren’t to add up to a more practical, safer, and more secure foreign (and domestic) policy, I would still be convinced that this was a better, saner way to go. As Americans demonstrate regularly when it comes to just about anything but terrorism, life is a danger zone and living with some level of insecurity is the human condition. Making our safety and security ultimate values is a grotesque mistake. It essentially ensures a future state that bears no relation whatsoever to a democratic polity or to the values this country has championed. Much that Americans once professed to cherish, from liberties to privacy, has already been lost along the way.

In your heart, you must know much of this, however you process it. I hope, under the circumstances, you’ll give some thought to what that word “patriot” should really mean in this country right now.

Yours sincerely,

Tom EngelhardtTomDispatch.com

P.S. In my own war on terror, I’ve recently been thinking that a few “thou shalts” are in order. To give you an example: Thou shalt honor the heroes of our American world -- and no, I’m not talking about the U.S. military! I mean people like journalist James Risen, who barely avoided jail for doing his job as a reporter and has now dedicated his life to “fighting to undo damage done to press freedom in the United States by Barack Obama and Eric Holder,” or activist Kathy Kelly who is at present in a federal prison in Kentucky for havingprotested American drone strikes at an Air Force base in Missouri.

To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com here.

Dear American Patriot,

I wish I knew your name. I’ve been thinking about you, about all of us actually and our country, and meaning to write for a while to explain myself. Let me start this way: you should feel free to call me an American nationalist. It may sound ugly as hell, but it’s one way I do think of myself. True, we Americans usually reserve the more kindly word “patriot” for ourselves and use “nationalist” to diss other people who exhibit special feeling for their country. In the extreme, it’s “superpatriot” for us and “ultranationalist” for them.

In any case, here’s how my particular form of nationalism manifests itself. I feel a responsibility for the acts of this country that I don’t feel for those of other states or groups. When, for instance, a wedding party blows up thanks to a Taliban roadside bomb, or the Islamic State cuts some poor captive’s head off, or Bashar al-Assad’s air force drops barrel bombs on civilians, or the Russians jail a political activist, or some other group or state commits some similar set of crimes, I’m not surprised. Human barbarity, as well as the arbitrary cruelty of state power, are unending facts of history. They should be opposed, but am I shocked? No.

Still -- and I accept the irrationality of this -- when my country wipes out wedding parties in other lands or organizes torture regimes and offshore prison systems where anything goes, or tries to jail yet another whistleblower, when it acts cruelly, arbitrarily, or barbarically, I feel shock and wonder why more Americans don’t have the same reaction.

Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t blame myself for the commission of such acts, but as an American, I do feel a special responsibility to do something about them, or at least to speak out against them -- as it should be the responsibility of others in their localities to deal with their particular sets of barbarians.

So think of my last 12 years running TomDispatch.com as my own modest war on terror -- American terror. We don’t, of course, like to think of ourselves as barbaric, and terror is, almost by definition, a set of un-American acts that others are eager to commit against us. “They” want to take us out in our malls and backyards. We would never commit such acts, not knowingly, not with malice aforethought. It matters little here that, from wedding partiesto funerals, women to children, we have, in fact, continued to take “them” out in their backyards quite regularly.

Most Americans would admit that this country makes mistakes. Despite our best efforts, we do sometimes produce what we like to call “collateral damage” as we go after the evildoers, but a terror regime? Not us. Never.

And this is part of the reason I’m writing you. I keep wondering how, in these years, it’s been possible to hold onto such fictions so successfully. I wonder why, at least some of the time, you aren’t jumping out of your skin over what we do, rather than what they’ve done or might prospectively do to us.

Let’s start with an uncomfortable fact of our world that few here care to mention: in one way or another, Washington has been complicit in the creation or strengthening of just about every extreme terror outfit across the Greater Middle East. If we weren’t their parents, in crucial cases we were at least their midwives or foster parents.

Start in the 1980s with the urge of President Ronald Reagan and his fundamentalist Catholic spymaster, CIA Director William Casey, to make allies of fundamentalist Islamic movements at a time when their extreme (and extremist) piety seemed attractively anticommunist. In that decade, in Afghanistan in particular, Reagan and Casey put money, arms, and training where their hearts and mouths were and promoted the most extreme Islamists who were ready to give the Soviet Union a bloody nose, a Vietnam in reverse.

To accomplish this, Washington also allied itself with an extreme religious state, Saudi Arabia, as well as Pakistan’s less than savory intelligence service. The result was major support for men -- President Reagan hailed them as “freedom fighters” and said of a visiting group of them in 1985, “These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers" -- some of whom are now fighting us in Afghanistan, and indirectly for what came to be known as al-Qaeda, an organization which emerged from the American-Saudi hothouse of the Afghan War. The rest, as they say, is history.

Similarly, American fingerprints are all over the new Islamic State (IS) or “caliphate” in Iraq and Syria. Its predecessor, al-Qaeda in Iraq, came into existence in the chaos and civil strife that followed the American invasion and occupation of that country, after Saddam Hussein’s military had been disbanded and hundreds of thousands of trained Sunni personnel tossed out onto the streets of Iraq’s cities. Much of the leadership of the Islamic State met, grew close, and trained potential recruits at Camp Bucca, an American military prison in Iraq. Without the acts of the Bush administration, IS would, in fact, have been inconceivable. In the same fashion, the U.S. (and NATO) intervention in Libya in 2011, including a seven-monthbombing campaign, helped create the conditions for the growth of extreme militias in parts of that country, as the U.S. drone assassination campaign in Yemen has visibly strengthened al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

In other words, each of the terror organizations we categorize as the unimaginably barbaric Other has a curiously intimate, if generally unexplored, relationship with us. In addition, in these years, it’s been clear (at least to those living in the Greater Middle East) that such groups had no monopoly on barbarity. Washington’s extreme acts were legion in the region, ranging from its CIA torture chambers (although we called them “black sites”) to Abu Ghraib, from global kidnappings to images of a U.S. helicopter gunning down civilians in the streets of Baghdad. There were also a range of well-publicized vengeful acts of war, including videos of U.S. troops laughing while urinating on enemy corpses, trophy photos of body parts taken by American soldiers as souvenirs, photos of a 12-member “kill team” that hunted Afghans “for sport,” and a striking “lone wolf” nighttime terror rampage by an American staff sergeant in Afghanistan who killed 16 villagers, mainly women and children. And that’s just for starters.

Then there’s one matter that TomDispatch has been alone here in focusing on. By my count, American airpower has blown away parts or all of at least eight wedding parties in three countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen), killing at least several hundred revelers over the years, without the slightest shock or upset in the U.S.

That’s one reason I’m writing you: the lack of reaction here. Can you imagine what would happen if the planes and drones from another country had wiped out eight weddings here in perhaps a dozen years?

On a larger scale, Washington’s invasions, occupations, interventions, bombings, and raids since 9/11 have resulted in a rising tide of civilian deaths and exiles in a fragmenting region. All of this, including those drone assassination campaigns in the backlands of the planet, adds up to a panorama of barbarism and terror that we seldom acknowledge as such. Of course, the terror outfits we love to hate also love to hate us and have often leapt to embrace the extremity of our acts, including adopting both the orange jumpsuits of Guantánamo and the CIA’s waterboarding for their own symbolic purposes.

Perhaps above all, Americans don’t imagine drones, the sexiesthigh-tech weapons around, as purveyors of terror. Yet our grimly named Predators and Reapers armed with “Hellfire” missiles, their pilots safe from harm thousands of miles away, buzz daily over the Pakistani tribal backlands and rural Yemenspreading terror below. That this is so should be indisputable, at least based on accounts from the ground.

In fact, Washington’s drone assassins might fit into a category we normally only apply to Them: “lone wolf” terrorists searching for targets to blow away. In our case, it’s people who have what Washington identifies as behavioral “traits” associated with terror suspects. They are eliminated in “signature strikes.” So here’s my question to you: Why is it that Americans generally don’t grasp the impact of such a new form of warfare in the Islamic world, especially when, at the movies (as in the Terminator films), we usually root against the machines and for the humans scurrying underfoot? The word American drone operators use to label their dead victims -- “bugsplat” -- reveals much. The term goes back at least to the non-drone shock-and-awe air attacks that began the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and reflects a disturbing sense of God-like, all-seeing power over the “insects” below.

Of course, part of the reason so little of this sinks in here is that all such acts, no matter how extreme, have been folded into a single comforting framework. You know the one I mean: the need for the national security state to keep Americans “safe” from terror. I think you’d agree that, by now, this is a sacrosanct principle of the post-9/11 era that's helped expand the national security state to a size unimaginable even in the Cold War years when this country had another imperial enemy.

Safety and security are much abused terms in our American world. The attacks of 9/11 created what might be thought of as a national version of PTSD from which we’ve never recovered, and yet the dangers of Islamic terrorism, while perfectly real, are relatively minor. Leave aside the truly threatening things in American life and take instead an obscure example of what I mean. Even the most modest research suggests that toddlers who find guns may kill or wound more Americans in a typical year than terrorists do. And yet the media deals with death-by-toddler as an oddity story, not a national crisis, whether the result is the death of a mother in a Wal-Mart in Idaho or the wounding of a father and mother in anAlbuquerque motel. Nor does the government regularly hype the dangers of “lone wolf” toddlers. And despite such killings, the legality of “carrying” guns (for “safety” -- of course! -- from unspecified non-toddler bad guys) is barely questioned in this country as the practice spreads rapidly both in numbers and in the kinds of places to which such weapons can be brought.

And don’t even waste your time thinking about the more than 30,000 deaths by vehicle each year. Americans coexist with such spectacular levels of carnage without significant complaint so that car culture can continue in the usual fashion. Yet let some distant terror group issue an absurd threat by video -- most recently, al-Shabab in Somalia warning of an attack on the Mall of America in Minnesota -- and the media alarm bells go off; the government issues warnings; the head of the Department of Homeland Security (worrying about his budget tied up in Congress) takes to TV to warn shoppers to be “particularly careful”; and pundits debate just how serious this danger may be. Forget that the only thing al-Shabab can hope for is that a disturbed doofus living somewhere in Minnesota might pick up one of the guns floating so freely around this society and head for that mall to do his damnedest.

And in the constant panic over our safety in situations where very little danger actually exists, our own barbarity, seen as a series of defensive acts to ensure our security, disappears in a sea of alarm.

So how to respond? I doubt you agree with me this far, so my response probably carries little weight with you. Nonetheless, let me offer it, with a caveat of sorts. Despite what you might imagine, I’m neither a pacifist, nor do I believe in a perfect world. And no, I wouldn’t disband the U.S. military. It’s clear enough that a strong, defensive-minded military is a necessity on this planet.

After 13 years, though, it should be obvious that this country’s military-first policies throughout the Greater Middle East and widening areas of Africa have been a disastrous bust. I have no doubt that a far less barbaric, less extreme, less militaristic foreign policy would, in purely pragmatic terms, also be a more effective one on every imaginable score -- unless, of course, your value system happens to center on the continued building up of the national security state and the reinforcement of its “security” or of the military-industrial complex andits “security.” In that case, the necessity for our barbarity as well as theirs becomes clearer in a flash.

Otherwise, despite much that we’ve heard in this new century, my suspicion is that what's right and moral is also what's practical and realistic. In that light, let me offer, with commentary, my version of the Ten Commandments for a better American world (and a better world generally). Admittedly, in this day and age, it could easily be the Twenty or Thirty Commandments, but being classically minded, let me just stick with 10.

1. Thou shalt not torture: Torture of every horrific sort in these years seems to have beenremarkably ineffective in producing useful information for the state. Even if it were provedeffective in breaking up al-Qaeda plots, however, it would still have been both a desperately illegal (if unpunished) act and a foreign policy disaster of the first order.

2. Thou shalt not send drones to assassinate anyone, American or not: The ongoing U.S. drone assassination campaigns, while killing individual terrorists, have driven significant numbers of people in the backlands of the planet into the arms of terror outfits and so only increased their size and appeal. Without a doubt, such drone strikes represent a global war of, not on, terror. In the process, they have turned the president into our assassin-in-chief and us into an assassin nation.

3. Thou shalt not invade another country: D'oh!

4. Thou shalt not occupy another country: By the way, how did that work out the last two times the U.S. tried it?

5. Thou shalt not upgrade thy nuclear arsenal: The U.S. has now committed itself to atrillion-dollar, decades-long upgrade of its vast arsenal. If any significant portion of it were ever used, it would end human life as we know it on this planet and so should be considered a singular prospective crime against humanity. After years in which the only American nuclear focus was on a country -- Iran -- with no nuclear weapons, that this has happened without serious debate or discussion is in itself criminal.

6.Thou shalt not intercept the communications of thy citizens or others all over the world or pursue the elaboration of a global surveillance state based on criminal acts: There seems to be no place the NSA has been unwilling to break into in order to surveil the planet. For unimaginable reams of information that have seemingly been of next to no actual use, the NSA and the national security state have essentially outlawed privacy and cracked open various amendments to the Constitution. No information is worth such a price.

7. Thou shalt not be free of punishment for crimes of state: In these years of genuine criminality, official Washington has become a crime-free zone. No matter the seriousness of the act, none -- not one committed in the name of the state in the post-9/11 era, no matter how heinous -- has been brought into a courtroom.

8. Thou shalt not use a massive system of secret classification to deprive Americans of all real knowledge of acts of state: In 2011, the U.S. classified 92 million documents and the shroud of secrecy over the business of the “people’s” government has only grown worse in the years since. Increasingly, for our own “safety” we are only supposed to know what the government prefers us to know. This represents, of course, a crime against democracy.

9. Thou shalt not act punitively toward those who want to let Americans in on what the national security state is doing in their name: The fierce and draconian campaign the Obama administration has launched against leakers and whistleblowers is unprecedented in our history. It is a growing challenge to freedom of the press and to the citizen’s right to know.

10. Thou shalt not infringe on the rights of the citizenry to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: Need I even explain?

If you want to boil these commandments down to a single injunction, it might simply be: Don’t do it! Or in a moment when nothing Washington does isn’t, it seems, done again: Stop and think before acting!

Of course, there’s no way to know what a national security policy based on these 10 commandments might really be like, not when Washington is so thoroughly invested in repeating its failed acts. It’s now deep into Iraq War 3.0, intent on further slowing the “withdrawal” from Afghanistan, and pursuing the usual drone assassination strategies, as from South Asia to Iraq, Yemen, and Libya things only worsen and jihadist organizationsgrow stronger.

Yet campaign 2016 is already shaping up as a contest among candidates who represent more of the same, much more of the same, and even more than that of the same. One of them has tellingly brought back as his advisers much of the cast of characters who planned the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

Even if the above commandments weren’t to add up to a more practical, safer, and more secure foreign (and domestic) policy, I would still be convinced that this was a better, saner way to go. As Americans demonstrate regularly when it comes to just about anything but terrorism, life is a danger zone and living with some level of insecurity is the human condition. Making our safety and security ultimate values is a grotesque mistake. It essentially ensures a future state that bears no relation whatsoever to a democratic polity or to the values this country has championed. Much that Americans once professed to cherish, from liberties to privacy, has already been lost along the way.

In your heart, you must know much of this, however you process it. I hope, under the circumstances, you’ll give some thought to what that word “patriot” should really mean in this country right now.

Yours sincerely,

Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com

P.S. In my own war on terror, I’ve recently been thinking that a few “thou shalts” are in order. To give you an example: Thou shalt honor the heroes of our American world -- and no, I’m not talking about the U.S. military! I mean people like journalist James Risen, who barely avoided jail for doing his job as a reporter and has now dedicated his life to “fighting to undo damage done to press freedom in the United States by Barack Obama and Eric Holder,” or activist Kathy Kelly who is at present in a federal prison in Kentucky for havingprotested American drone strikes at an Air Force base in Missouri.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/world/guess-what-scott-walker-and-isis-have-commonGuess What Scott Walker and ISIS Have in Commonhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/86228902/0/alternet_world~Guess-What-Scott-Walker-and-ISIS-Have-in-Common

Last month, during an event that was overshadowed by Rudy Giuliani's remarks about Obama's supposed lack of love for America, Wisconsin's Republican governor and likely 2016 presidential contender Scott Walker claimed his restrictions of public employee collective bargaining rights would send a tough message to ISIS and Vladmir Putin:

"Noteworthy, Walker argued that when Reagan fired the PATCO air-traffic controllers over their illegal strike, he was sending a message of toughness to Democrats and unions at home as well as our Soviet enemies abroad. Similarly, Walker believes his stance against unions in Wisconsin would be a signal of toughness to Islamic jihadists and Russia’s Vladimir Putin."

A week later, Walker doubled down, saying, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” again seeming to say that cracking down on labor unions is evidence of his foreign policy toughness.

But what's ironic about Walker's comments is that the foes he is posturing as being so tough against—chiefly, ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria—seem to agree with his loathing of labor unions.

ISIS Vs.Iraq's Unions

Iraq's labor unions have spent years under siege by a variety of actors. First, they faced off with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who undercut their bargaining rights by classifying most workers as civil servants, which prohibited them from directly forming unions. Many of these laws persisted after Hussein's fall, and the unions were particularly incensed by the waves of privatization that occurred in occupied Iraq.

The latest assault on Iraq's unions comes not from the Baath government or foreign occupiers but rather the extreme ISIS militants. The AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center—which documents and agitates against labor abuses abroad—has the rundown on attacks on labor unionists since June 2014, when ISIS rapidly expanded in Northern Iraq. The group notes:

Iraqi workers and their families have faced unemployment, violence, displacement—and sometimes murder. Many businesses and work sites have closed due to violent clashes between ISIS and military forces, especially in cities such as Mosul, Tikrit, Ramadi and some parts of Diyala

In Mosul, ISIS broke into the main trade union's building; in September, they kidnapped and killed the wife of a union leader in the General Federation of Iraqi Workers.

ISIS kidnapped and killed “eight public service-sector workers after they questioned the group’s authority and protested arbitrary work policies," according to the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI). In October, FWCUI reported that ISIS forced workers to work without pay, and responded to demands for wages with the kidnappings.

Additionally, “members from ISIS-controlled areas have reported receiving threats from ISIS because of their union involvement. ISIS militants stole cars and money from the GFIW branch in Mosul and also confiscated the house and car of the branch president, who discussed the situation with Solidarity Center staff. He said he was forced to leave with no belongings and was shot in his leg when he tried to save his family. He said that in addition to his union activity, his family likely was targeted because his wife planned to run for Parliament. Many union members report they fled Mosul and other ISIS-controlled areas, such as Salah el Din and Anbar, due to the threats and intimidation.”

In addition to fighting for decent wages and employment in both ISIS-controlled and government-controlled territories, the GFIW has been outspoken in support of women who are being mistreated and in some cases used as sex slaves by the ISIS militants. In a statement it put out in December, it denounced the organization's brutality toward women. Here's an excerpt:

Central office of working women and children’s affairs at the GFIW expresses its utmost rage and condemnation on the savage barbaric attack by the monsters of life and all times against our region, including some of our beloved governorates.

Enemies of humanity were not satisfied with all the destruction in the cities they invaded and devastation to all aspects of life that they caused, but went much further by savagely raping women in those cities under the name of (Jihad Al Nikah: marital (sexual) Jehad). Women were brutally taken as hostages and sold in the markets of slavery!

At the time we denounce those dirty acts, we salute the courageous women who denied to be sex slaves under that misleading name they gave to it, and rejected the orders of those barbarians. One hundred and fifty women from Fallujah refused the savages orders for Jihad Al Nikah: marital (sexual) Jehad, and based on that the dirty savages executed all of them.

This is how Iraqi women are, this is how we always knew them; strong and courageous, they never feared the swords of ISIS, and were inspired by their predecessors the great women in Arab history like Al Khansa’a and Um Al baneen.

Faulty Analogy

It's worth also noting that Walker's original analogy to Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers is far from solid. Reviewing his claim that the Soviet Union increased its respect of the United States after the firings, Politifact gave Walker a “Pants On Fire." The fact is that Reagan himself understood that labor was actually an asset in dealing with Soviet rule; he was a supporter of the Polish union Solidarity, and condemned the Soviets' infringing on the “basic right of free trade unions and to strike.”

If anything, Reagan wanted to appear a supporter of labor unions abroad, and did little to mention his crackdown on labor at home.

But accuracy isn't exactly Walker's goal here. With a thin foreign policy resume, he is trying to capitalize on his crusade against labor unions, portraying it as a sign of toughness abroad. The reality is, however, that many of the same actors we rightly oppose abroad have been even harsher on labor unions than Walker has, because traditionally there is a link between those who oppose free association of laborers and those who oppose liberty.

Last month, during an event that was overshadowed by Rudy Giuliani's remarks about Obama's supposed lack of love for America, Wisconsin's Republican governor and likely 2016 presidential contender Scott Walker claimed his restrictions of public employee collective bargaining rights would send a tough message to ISIS and Vladmir Putin:

"Noteworthy, Walker argued that when Reagan fired the PATCO air-traffic controllers over their illegal strike, he was sending a message of toughness to Democrats and unions at home as well as our Soviet enemies abroad. Similarly, Walker believes his stance against unions in Wisconsin would be a signal of toughness to Islamic jihadists and Russia’s Vladimir Putin."

A week later, Walker doubled down, saying, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” again seeming to say that cracking down on labor unions is evidence of his foreign policy toughness.

But what's ironic about Walker's comments is that the foes he is posturing as being so tough against—chiefly, ISIS militants in Iraq and Syria—seem to agree with his loathing of labor unions.

ISIS Vs.Iraq's Unions

Iraq's labor unions have spent years under siege by a variety of actors. First, they faced off with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, who undercut their bargaining rights by classifying most workers as civil servants, which prohibited them from directly forming unions. Many of these laws persisted after Hussein's fall, and the unions were particularly incensed by the waves of privatization that occurred in occupied Iraq.

The latest assault on Iraq's unions comes not from the Baath government or foreign occupiers but rather the extreme ISIS militants. The AFL-CIO's Solidarity Center—which documents and agitates against labor abuses abroad—has the rundown on attacks on labor unionists since June 2014, when ISIS rapidly expanded in Northern Iraq. The group notes:

Iraqi workers and their families have faced unemployment, violence, displacement—and sometimes murder. Many businesses and work sites have closed due to violent clashes between ISIS and military forces, especially in cities such as Mosul, Tikrit, Ramadi and some parts of Diyala

In Mosul, ISIS broke into the main trade union's building; in September, they kidnapped and killed the wife of a union leader in the General Federation of Iraqi Workers.

ISIS kidnapped and killed “eight public service-sector workers after they questioned the group’s authority and protested arbitrary work policies," according to the Federation of Workers Councils and Unions in Iraq (FWCUI). In October, FWCUI reported that ISIS forced workers to work without pay, and responded to demands for wages with the kidnappings.

Additionally, “members from ISIS-controlled areas have reported receiving threats from ISIS because of their union involvement. ISIS militants stole cars and money from the GFIW branch in Mosul and also confiscated the house and car of the branch president, who discussed the situation with Solidarity Center staff. He said he was forced to leave with no belongings and was shot in his leg when he tried to save his family. He said that in addition to his union activity, his family likely was targeted because his wife planned to run for Parliament. Many union members report they fled Mosul and other ISIS-controlled areas, such as Salah el Din and Anbar, due to the threats and intimidation.”

In addition to fighting for decent wages and employment in both ISIS-controlled and government-controlled territories, the GFIW has been outspoken in support of women who are being mistreated and in some cases used as sex slaves by the ISIS militants. In a statement it put out in December, it denounced the organization's brutality toward women. Here's an excerpt:

Central office of working women and children’s affairs at the GFIW expresses its utmost rage and condemnation on the savage barbaric attack by the monsters of life and all times against our region, including some of our beloved governorates.

Enemies of humanity were not satisfied with all the destruction in the cities they invaded and devastation to all aspects of life that they caused, but went much further by savagely raping women in those cities under the name of (Jihad Al Nikah: marital (sexual) Jehad). Women were brutally taken as hostages and sold in the markets of slavery!

At the time we denounce those dirty acts, we salute the courageous women who denied to be sex slaves under that misleading name they gave to it, and rejected the orders of those barbarians. One hundred and fifty women from Fallujah refused the savages orders for Jihad Al Nikah: marital (sexual) Jehad, and based on that the dirty savages executed all of them.

This is how Iraqi women are, this is how we always knew them; strong and courageous, they never feared the swords of ISIS, and were inspired by their predecessors the great women in Arab history like Al Khansa’a and Um Al baneen.

Faulty Analogy

It's worth also noting that Walker's original analogy to Reagan's firing of striking air traffic controllers is far from solid. Reviewing his claim that the Soviet Union increased its respect of the United States after the firings, Politifact gave Walker a “Pants On Fire." The fact is that Reagan himself understood that labor was actually an asset in dealing with Soviet rule; he was a supporter of the Polish union Solidarity, and condemned the Soviets' infringing on the “basic right of free trade unions and to strike.”

If anything, Reagan wanted to appear a supporter of labor unions abroad, and did little to mention his crackdown on labor at home.

But accuracy isn't exactly Walker's goal here. With a thin foreign policy resume, he is trying to capitalize on his crusade against labor unions, portraying it as a sign of toughness abroad. The reality is, however, that many of the same actors we rightly oppose abroad have been even harsher on labor unions than Walker has, because traditionally there is a link between those who oppose free association of laborers and those who oppose liberty.

Internet parodies abound after the Wisconsin governor compares union members to terrorists.

Yesterday, when asked about ISIS, presidential hopeful and current Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said that his response to the peaceful labor protests in Madison in 2011 prepared him to stamp out international terrorism. Apparently that means that in case of a terrorist attack he would sneak in and out of the White House via a not-so-secret rat tunnel and consult on the phone with bloggers pretending to be billionaire David Koch.

Asked about ISIS, Walker responded, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.”

That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.

Naturally, the "terrorists" in Wisconsin have unleashed a counterattack - in the form of a super-satirical barrage of photo memes.

One citizen suggested spreading this image in case ISIS comes looking for revenge:

Here are some more. Feel free to post any additional memes in the comments.

That is one terrifying smile:

The Red Scare!!!

Be sure to check her Birkenstocks for incendiary devices...

It only took 6 burly cops to arrest this man for holding a sign. What courage. What bravery! And they arrested him right next to the copy of the Wisconsin Constitution that states in Article 1 that the right of the citizens to petition the government "shall never be abridged." Oh well.

You know they start those terrorists really young...

Look out behind you, Granny!

Leaving so soon?

One more. I feel so much safer now...

ENCORE! You asked for more, so here you go. Here is an obvious pinko terrorist...

You can spot the home-grown terrorists right away...

As my friend Ed says, the war on Christmas terrorism. Are those ISIS-cicles on the tree?

Finally, let us not forget the Capitol Police version of "If I Had a Hammer", which starts and ends with "If I Had a Hammer, I'd Hammer on the Black Guy..."

Internet parodies abound after the Wisconsin governor compares union members to terrorists.

Yesterday, when asked about ISIS, presidential hopeful and current Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker said that his response to the peaceful labor protests in Madison in 2011 prepared him to stamp out international terrorism. Apparently that means that in case of a terrorist attack he would sneak in and out of the White House via a not-so-secret rat tunnel and consult on the phone with bloggers pretending to be billionaire David Koch.

Asked about ISIS, Walker responded, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the globe.”

That is a terrible response. First, taking on a bunch of protesters is not comparably difficult to taking on a Caliphate with sympathizers and terrorists around the globe, and saying so suggests Walker doesn’t quite understand the complexity of the challenge from ISIS and its allied groups.

Naturally, the "terrorists" in Wisconsin have unleashed a counterattack - in the form of a super-satirical barrage of photo memes.

One citizen suggested spreading this image in case ISIS comes looking for revenge:

Here are some more. Feel free to post any additional memes in the comments.

That is one terrifying smile:

The Red Scare!!!

Be sure to check her Birkenstocks for incendiary devices...

It only took 6 burly cops to arrest this man for holding a sign. What courage. What bravery! And they arrested him right next to the copy of the Wisconsin Constitution that states in Article 1 that the right of the citizens to petition the government "shall never be abridged." Oh well.

You know they start those terrorists really young...

Look out behind you, Granny!

Leaving so soon?

One more. I feel so much safer now...

ENCORE! You asked for more, so here you go. Here is an obvious pinko terrorist...

You can spot the home-grown terrorists right away...

As my friend Ed says, the war on Christmas terrorism. Are those ISIS-cicles on the tree?

Finally, let us not forget the Capitol Police version of "If I Had a Hammer", which starts and ends with "If I Had a Hammer, I'd Hammer on the Black Guy..."

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/american-atheist-blogger-hacked-death-bangladeshAmerican Atheist Blogger Hacked to Death in Bangladeshhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/86092971/0/alternet_world~American-Atheist-Blogger-Hacked-to-Death-in-Bangladesh

Attack on blogger and his wife ignites protests in Dhaka.

A prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin has been hacked to death with machetes by unidentified assailants in Dhaka, after he allegedly received threats from Islamists.

The body of Avijit Roy, founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog site – which champions liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation – was found covered in blood after an attack that also left his wife critically wounded.

“He died as he was brought to the hospital. His wife was also seriously wounded. She has lost a finger,” local police chief Sirajul Islam said.

The couple were on a bicycle rickshaw, returning from a book fair, when two assailants stopped and dragged them on to the pavement before striking them with machetes, local media reported, citing witnesses.

Hundreds of protesters rallied in Dhaka to denounce the murder, chanting slogans including “we want justice” and “raise your voice against militants”.

Imran Sarker, the head of the Bangladesh bloggers’ association, said the protests would continue until those responsible were apprehended. “Avijit’s killing once again proved that there is a culture of impunity in the country,” Sarker told Agence France-Presse. “The government must arrest the killers in 24 hours or face non-stop protests.”

Roy, who was 42, is the second Bangladeshi blogger to have been murdered in two years and the fourth writer to have been attacked since 2004.

Hardline Islamist groups have long demanded the public killing of atheist bloggers and sought new laws to deal with writing critical of Islam.

“Roy suffered fatal wounds in the head and died from bleeding ... after being brought to the hospital,” Dr Sohel Ahmed told reporters.

Police have launched an inquiry and recovered the machetes used in the attack but could not confirm whether Islamists were behind the incident.

But Roy’s father said the writer, a US citizen, had received a number of “threatening” emails and messages on social media from hardliners unhappy with his writing. “He was a secular humanist and has written about 10 books,” Ajoy Roy told AFP.His most famous work was Biswasher Virus (Virus of Faith).

The Center for Inquiry, a US-based charity promoting free thought, said it was “shocked and heartbroken” by the brutal murder. “Dr Roy was a true ally, a courageous and eloquent defender of reason, science, and free expression, in a country where those values have been under heavy attack,” it said in a statement.

Roy’s killing also triggered strong condemnation from his fellow writers and publishers, who lamented the growing religious conservatism and intolerance in Bangladesh.

“The attack on Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed, is outrageous. We strongly protest this attack and are deeply concerned about the safety of writers,” said Sarker.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, a fellow blogger and friend of Roy, claimed one of the country’s largest online book retailers was being openly threatened for selling Roy’s books.

“In Bangladesh the easiest target is an atheist. An atheist can be attacked and murdered,” he wrote on Facebook.

Atheist blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider was hacked to death in 2013 by members of a little-known Islamist militant group, triggering nationwide protests by tens of thousands of secular activists.

“The pattern of the killing appeared to be the same as that of previous attack on a celebrated writer,” said Shiblee Noman, assistant commissioner of Dhaka police. “It seems it was carried out by a reactionary fundamentalist group.”

After Haider’s death, Bangladesh’s hardline Islamist groups started to protest against other campaigning bloggers, calling a series of nationwide strikes to demand their deaths, accusing them of blasphemy.

The secular government of the Bangladeshi prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, reacted by arresting some atheist bloggers.

The government also blocked about a dozen websites and blogs to stem the furore over blasphemy, as well as stepping up security for the bloggers.

On Friday Sarker said: “Communal and militant groups have threatened the very spirit of our nation. Yet instead of crushing them, the government was keen on appeasing them by arresting secular bloggers.”

Noman said police were investigating a tweet by the pro-Islamist group Ansar Bangla Seven that appeared to celebrate Roy’s murder.

“Target Down here in Bangladesh,” the group tweeted from the @AnsarBn7 handle.

The US embassy to Bangladesh offered its condolences to Roy’s family and said it was providing consular assistance. Roy’s wife, who is also a blogger, was moved to a clinic for further treatment on Friday.

Bangladesh is the world’s fourth-largest Muslim majority nation with Muslims making up some 90 per cent of the country’s 160 million people.

A tribunal has recently handed down a series of verdicts against leading Islamists and others for crimes committed during the war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.

A prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin has been hacked to death with machetes by unidentified assailants in Dhaka, after he allegedly received threats from Islamists.

The body of Avijit Roy, founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog site – which champions liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation – was found covered in blood after an attack that also left his wife critically wounded.

“He died as he was brought to the hospital. His wife was also seriously wounded. She has lost a finger,” local police chief Sirajul Islam said.

The couple were on a bicycle rickshaw, returning from a book fair, when two assailants stopped and dragged them on to the pavement before striking them with machetes, local media reported, citing witnesses.

Hundreds of protesters rallied in Dhaka to denounce the murder, chanting slogans including “we want justice” and “raise your voice against militants”.

Imran Sarker, the head of the Bangladesh bloggers’ association, said the protests would continue until those responsible were apprehended. “Avijit’s killing once again proved that there is a culture of impunity in the country,” Sarker told Agence France-Presse. “The government must arrest the killers in 24 hours or face non-stop protests.”

Roy, who was 42, is the second Bangladeshi blogger to have been murdered in two years and the fourth writer to have been attacked since 2004.

Hardline Islamist groups have long demanded the public killing of atheist bloggers and sought new laws to deal with writing critical of Islam.

“Roy suffered fatal wounds in the head and died from bleeding ... after being brought to the hospital,” Dr Sohel Ahmed told reporters.

Police have launched an inquiry and recovered the machetes used in the attack but could not confirm whether Islamists were behind the incident.

But Roy’s father said the writer, a US citizen, had received a number of “threatening” emails and messages on social media from hardliners unhappy with his writing. “He was a secular humanist and has written about 10 books,” Ajoy Roy told AFP.His most famous work was Biswasher Virus (Virus of Faith).

The Center for Inquiry, a US-based charity promoting free thought, said it was “shocked and heartbroken” by the brutal murder. “Dr Roy was a true ally, a courageous and eloquent defender of reason, science, and free expression, in a country where those values have been under heavy attack,” it said in a statement.

Roy’s killing also triggered strong condemnation from his fellow writers and publishers, who lamented the growing religious conservatism and intolerance in Bangladesh.

“The attack on Roy and his wife, Rafida Ahmed, is outrageous. We strongly protest this attack and are deeply concerned about the safety of writers,” said Sarker.

Pinaki Bhattacharya, a fellow blogger and friend of Roy, claimed one of the country’s largest online book retailers was being openly threatened for selling Roy’s books.

“In Bangladesh the easiest target is an atheist. An atheist can be attacked and murdered,” he wrote on Facebook.

Atheist blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider was hacked to death in 2013 by members of a little-known Islamist militant group, triggering nationwide protests by tens of thousands of secular activists.

“The pattern of the killing appeared to be the same as that of previous attack on a celebrated writer,” said Shiblee Noman, assistant commissioner of Dhaka police. “It seems it was carried out by a reactionary fundamentalist group.”

After Haider’s death, Bangladesh’s hardline Islamist groups started to protest against other campaigning bloggers, calling a series of nationwide strikes to demand their deaths, accusing them of blasphemy.

The secular government of the Bangladeshi prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, reacted by arresting some atheist bloggers.

The government also blocked about a dozen websites and blogs to stem the furore over blasphemy, as well as stepping up security for the bloggers.

On Friday Sarker said: “Communal and militant groups have threatened the very spirit of our nation. Yet instead of crushing them, the government was keen on appeasing them by arresting secular bloggers.”

Noman said police were investigating a tweet by the pro-Islamist group Ansar Bangla Seven that appeared to celebrate Roy’s murder.

“Target Down here in Bangladesh,” the group tweeted from the @AnsarBn7 handle.

The US embassy to Bangladesh offered its condolences to Roy’s family and said it was providing consular assistance. Roy’s wife, who is also a blogger, was moved to a clinic for further treatment on Friday.

Bangladesh is the world’s fourth-largest Muslim majority nation with Muslims making up some 90 per cent of the country’s 160 million people.

A tribunal has recently handed down a series of verdicts against leading Islamists and others for crimes committed during the war of independence from Pakistan in 1971.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/economy/paul-krugman-how-austerity-madness-was-dealt-crucial-blow-weekPaul Krugman: How Austerity Madness Was Dealt a Crucial Blow this Weekhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/86082238/0/alternet_world~Paul-Krugman-How-Austerity-Madness-Was-Dealt-a-Crucial-Blow-this-Week

"The Greek government didn’t succumb to the bum’s rush, and that in itself is a kind of victory."

Paul Krugman takes a contrarian view of the deal the new Greek government reached with its creditors earlier in the week. The deal was widely derided on the left as a disaster, a “surrender” on the part of Syriza, the new ruling coalition in Athens.

Krugman does not agree. "On the contrary," he writes in Friday's column, "Greece came out of the negotiations pretty well, although the big fights are still to come. And by doing O.K., Greece has done the rest of Europe a favor."

Here's his analysis:

To make sense of what happened, you need to understand that the main issue of contention involves just one number: the size of the Greek primary surplus, the difference between government revenues and government expenditures not counting interest on the debt. The primary surplus measures the resources that Greece is actually transferring to its creditors. Everything else, including the notional size of the debt — which is a more or less arbitrary number at this point, with little bearing on the amount anyone expects Greece to pay — matters only to the extent that it affects the primary surplus Greece is forced to run.

For Greece to run any surplus at all — given the depression-level slump that it’s in and the effect of that depression on revenues — is a remarkable achievement, the result of incredible sacrifices. Nonetheless, Syriza has always been clear that it intends to keep running a modest primary surplus. If you are angry that the negotiations didn’t make room for a full reversal of austerity, a turn toward Keynesian fiscal stimulus, you weren’t paying attention.

Why would any government agree to such a thing? Fear. Essentially, successive leaders in Greece and other debtor nations haven’t dared to challenge extreme creditor demands, for fear that they would be punished — that the creditors would cut off their cash flow or, worse yet, implode their banking system if they balked at ever-harsher budget cuts.

And this is precisely where the new Greek government showed a lot more backbone in the negotiations than the previous one. In fact, Greece won new flexibility for this year, a luxury the embattled nation has not had for quite a while. The creditors not only did not pull the plug, they gave them financing for the next few months. Sure, there are big battles looming in the future, but for now, "the Greek government didn’t succumb to the bum’s rush, and that in itself is a kind of victory," Krugman writes.

The coverage about the agreement has been nearly uniformly negative, however. Some of that is justified: Syriza left in place some privatization of public assets, labor market regulation and promised to crack down on tax evaders, although that last one does not exactly sound like a terrible leftist defeat. Krugman:

Still, nothing that just happened justifies the pervasive rhetoric of failure. Actually, my sense is that we’re seeing an unholy alliance here between left-leaning writers with unrealistic expectations and the business press, which likes the story of Greek debacle because that’s what is supposed to happen to uppity debtors. But there was no debacle. Provisionally, at least, Greece seems to have ended the cycle of ever-more-savage austerity.

Meanwhile, there were some positive signs in the rest of Europe, and Krugman thinks they may have Greece to thank in some small measure. There are some signs that the continent is emerging from its austerity madness, and just in the nick of time. Example: the European Commission has decided not to fine France and Italy for exceeding their deficit targets.

We should all be rooting for Greece to keep calm and carry on. The rest of the world's economy may depend on it.

"The Greek government didn’t succumb to the bum’s rush, and that in itself is a kind of victory."

Paul Krugman takes a contrarian view of the deal the new Greek government reached with its creditors earlier in the week. The deal was widely derided on the left as a disaster, a “surrender” on the part of Syriza, the new ruling coalition in Athens.

Krugman does not agree. "On the contrary," he writes in Friday's column, "Greece came out of the negotiations pretty well, although the big fights are still to come. And by doing O.K., Greece has done the rest of Europe a favor."

Here's his analysis:

To make sense of what happened, you need to understand that the main issue of contention involves just one number: the size of the Greek primary surplus, the difference between government revenues and government expenditures not counting interest on the debt. The primary surplus measures the resources that Greece is actually transferring to its creditors. Everything else, including the notional size of the debt — which is a more or less arbitrary number at this point, with little bearing on the amount anyone expects Greece to pay — matters only to the extent that it affects the primary surplus Greece is forced to run.

For Greece to run any surplus at all — given the depression-level slump that it’s in and the effect of that depression on revenues — is a remarkable achievement, the result of incredible sacrifices. Nonetheless, Syriza has always been clear that it intends to keep running a modest primary surplus. If you are angry that the negotiations didn’t make room for a full reversal of austerity, a turn toward Keynesian fiscal stimulus, you weren’t paying attention.

Why would any government agree to such a thing? Fear. Essentially, successive leaders in Greece and other debtor nations haven’t dared to challenge extreme creditor demands, for fear that they would be punished — that the creditors would cut off their cash flow or, worse yet, implode their banking system if they balked at ever-harsher budget cuts.

And this is precisely where the new Greek government showed a lot more backbone in the negotiations than the previous one. In fact, Greece won new flexibility for this year, a luxury the embattled nation has not had for quite a while. The creditors not only did not pull the plug, they gave them financing for the next few months. Sure, there are big battles looming in the future, but for now, "the Greek government didn’t succumb to the bum’s rush, and that in itself is a kind of victory," Krugman writes.

The coverage about the agreement has been nearly uniformly negative, however. Some of that is justified: Syriza left in place some privatization of public assets, labor market regulation and promised to crack down on tax evaders, although that last one does not exactly sound like a terrible leftist defeat. Krugman:

Still, nothing that just happened justifies the pervasive rhetoric of failure. Actually, my sense is that we’re seeing an unholy alliance here between left-leaning writers with unrealistic expectations and the business press, which likes the story of Greek debacle because that’s what is supposed to happen to uppity debtors. But there was no debacle. Provisionally, at least, Greece seems to have ended the cycle of ever-more-savage austerity.

Meanwhile, there were some positive signs in the rest of Europe, and Krugman thinks they may have Greece to thank in some small measure. There are some signs that the continent is emerging from its austerity madness, and just in the nick of time. Example: the European Commission has decided not to fine France and Italy for exceeding their deficit targets.

We should all be rooting for Greece to keep calm and carry on. The rest of the world's economy may depend on it.

The 26-year-old west Londoner and university graduate, was given the nickname ‘Jihadi John’ by a group of his hostages.

A British man has been identified as the knife-wielding militant who appears in Islamic State videos claiming responsibility for the beheadings of US, British and other hostages.

The Guardian has confirmed that Mohammad Emwazi, a 26-year-old west Londoner and university graduate, is the militant. He had been given the moniker “Jihadi John” by a group of his hostages, who described him as part of an Isis cell they named “the Beatles”.

Emwazi guarded western hostages and handled negotiations with their families. By all accounts he is a ruthless killer who has shown little compunction about his gory, on-screen murders.

Emwazi arrived in Britain as a young boy, aged six, after being born in Kuwait. He grew up in west London and was known as a polite, mild-mannered young man.

Those who knew him say he had a penchant for wearing stylish clothes but remained an observant Muslim. The Post describes him as bearded and careful not to make eye contact with women.

He graduated in 2009 in information technology and is also fluent in Arabic. However, instead of building a computing career, Emwazi ended up on MI5’s radar.

Over the course of a year he claimed to have been harassed and intimidated by the security services. In 2010, he went as far as to file a complaint with the Independent Police Complaints Commission over his treatment.

A US government official confirmed Emwazi’s identity to the Guardian, after the British security services declined to confirm or deny that he was the knife-wielding killer. Downing Street also refused to comment on the reports.

David Cameron’s deputy spokeswoman said: “We cannot confirm or deny anything in relation to intelligence. The point the prime minister would make, which we have said since we have seen the awful actions of these Isil [Isis] terrorists, is that we are absolutely determined to bring the perpetrators to justice. The police and security agencies have been working hard to do that.”

Questioned about whether Emwazi was known to the security services, she said: “I’m not going to get into the details of an ongoing police and security investigation.”

Asked if Downing Street had any concerns about Emwazi being named, she said: “The point I would make is that there is an ongoing investigation. It is absolutely right that we allow the police and security agencies to do all they can to bring those responsible to justice and help keep British people safe.”

As early as September last year, MI5 and the FBI had identified Emwazi as the masked killer. They did not make his name public mainly because of fears about the impact his identification might have on hostages being held by Islamic State. A secondary reason was concern over the safety of Emwazi’s family in the UK, in case of retaliation.

The intelligence agencies are unable to comment on the claim that it tried to recruit Emwazi, in part because the killings of the hostages by his grouping are still a matter of police investigation. But the parliamentary intelligence and security committee report into the Lee Rigby murder sets out the agency’s position.

The intelligence committee wrote: “Agents are one of MI5’s most important sources of intelligence. MI5 often approaches subjects of interest (SoIs) in order to try to recruit them as agents.”

According to people who have moved in jihadi circles in west London, Emwazi began to be noticed about five or six years ago. “That’s when he emerged, so to speak,” said one. Among his associates at that time was Bilal el-Berjawi, a Londoner of Lebanese origin who was killed by a drone strike in Somalia three years ago.

In August 2009, Emwazi went on a supposed safari holiday to Tanzania, but on landing in the capital he said he was detained by police and held overnight.

In a series of statements to Cage, which campaigns on behalf of communities affected by the “war on terror”, Emwazi alleged he was threatened with beatings by gun-toting members of Tanzania’s security forces.

After being refused entry to Tanzania he was put on a plane to the Netherlands, where he said he was questioned by an MI5 agent named “Nick” who accused him of wanting to fight in Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabaab operates in the southern part of the country.

In emails seen by the Guardian, Emwazi said the British agent knew “everything about me; where I lived, what I did, and the people I hang around with”. He is then claimed to have tried to “turn” Emwazi, asking: “Why don’t you work for us?” When he refused, MI5 said “life would be harder for you”.

Emwazi remained entangled with MI5. Over the next few months, he was again detained and interrogated.

Emwazi decided to move to Kuwait, where he landed a job working for a computer company, according to the emails he wrote to Cage. He came back to London twice, the second time to finalise his wedding plans to a woman in Kuwait.

In June 2010, however, counter-terrorism officials in Britain detained him again – this time fingerprinting him and searching his belongings. When he tried to fly back to Kuwait the next day, he was prevented from doing so. In his final interrogation he claimed to have been strangled by a police officer.

Emwazi is thought to have been incensed by the decision to bar him from Kuwait, the land of his birth, and where he had worked and planned to marry.

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a June 2010 email to Cage. But now “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”Cage said that it spent two years communicating with Emwazi, in which he highlighted interference by the UK security agencies as he sought to find redress within the system.

He told the organisation: “I have been trying to find out the reason for my refused visa issue from my home country Kuwait, and a way to solve the issue. So through my friends in Kuwait, it has been said to me that Kuwait has no problem with me entering, and the reason for my refusal is simply because the UK agents have told them to not let me in!!”

Asim Qureshi, research director of Cage, said there were parallels with the killer of Lee Rigby, Michael Adebolajo.

“Suffocating domestic policies aimed at turning a person into an informant but which prevent a person from fulfilling their basic life needs would have left a lasting impression on Emwazi. He desperately wanted to use the system to change his situation, but the system ultimately rejected him.”

But a leading researcher into counter-terrorism and intelligence, Shashank Joshi of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, said it was MI5’s job to recruit informers.

He rejected the Cage narrative of radicalisation by the British state as simplistic. “It seems to me MI5 did a reasonable job,” Joshi said. MI5 had enough evidence to show Emwazi was associated with radical elements early on and had good reason to watch him, he said.

He desperately wanted to use the system to change his situation, but the system ultimately rejected him

Asim Qureshi, of Cage

Close friends of Emwazi told the Post that his situation in London had made him desperate to leave the country. It is unclear exactly when he reached Syria or how.

One friend said he believed Emwazi wanted to travel to Saudi Arabia to teach English in 2012 but was unsuccessful. He left soon afterwards, the friend said.

“He was upset and wanted to start a life elsewhere,” one of the friends said. “He at some stage reached the point where he was really just trying to find another way to get out.”

By 2012 he told friends he wanted to go to Syria. Almost all advised him against it.

Before he was named publicly, web searches for his name brought up only results from the electoral roll, listing various west London addresses where he lived with his family.

Similarly, his brother’s Facebook account has been deleted, as have various social media, and UK LinkedIn profiles connected to his sister, though she now appears to have a new, Kuwait-based LinkedIn page.

Emwazi and Berjawi were members of a loose-knit group of young Muslims from the North Kensington area of west London who attended the same mosques and played five-a-side football together.

Another member of the group, Mohamed Sakr, was killed in a drone strike in Somalia a few weeks after Berjawi. Although born in the UK, he was a dual UK-Egyptian national; the UK government had stripped him of his British citizenship shortly before he was killed.

Some members of this group were investigated by MI5 because of their links with the men who attempted to carry out a wave of bombings on London’s underground train network on 21 July 2005.

Others came to the attention of the authorities in other ways. Mohammed Ezzouek, for example, who attended North Westminster Community school with Berjawi, was interrogated by British intelligence officers after a trip to Somalia in 2006; another schoolmate, Tariq al-Daour, has been released from jail after serving a sentence for inciting terrorism.

The 26-year-old west Londoner and university graduate, was given the nickname ‘Jihadi John’ by a group of his hostages.

A British man has been identified as the knife-wielding militant who appears in Islamic State videos claiming responsibility for the beheadings of US, British and other hostages.

The Guardian has confirmed that Mohammad Emwazi, a 26-year-old west Londoner and university graduate, is the militant. He had been given the moniker “Jihadi John” by a group of his hostages, who described him as part of an Isis cell they named “the Beatles”.

Emwazi guarded western hostages and handled negotiations with their families. By all accounts he is a ruthless killer who has shown little compunction about his gory, on-screen murders.

Emwazi arrived in Britain as a young boy, aged six, after being born in Kuwait. He grew up in west London and was known as a polite, mild-mannered young man.

Those who knew him say he had a penchant for wearing stylish clothes but remained an observant Muslim. The Post describes him as bearded and careful not to make eye contact with women.

He graduated in 2009 in information technology and is also fluent in Arabic. However, instead of building a computing career, Emwazi ended up on MI5’s radar.

Over the course of a year he claimed to have been harassed and intimidated by the security services. In 2010, he went as far as to file a complaint with the Independent Police Complaints Commission over his treatment.

A US government official confirmed Emwazi’s identity to the Guardian, after the British security services declined to confirm or deny that he was the knife-wielding killer. Downing Street also refused to comment on the reports.

David Cameron’s deputy spokeswoman said: “We cannot confirm or deny anything in relation to intelligence. The point the prime minister would make, which we have said since we have seen the awful actions of these Isil [Isis] terrorists, is that we are absolutely determined to bring the perpetrators to justice. The police and security agencies have been working hard to do that.”

Questioned about whether Emwazi was known to the security services, she said: “I’m not going to get into the details of an ongoing police and security investigation.”

Asked if Downing Street had any concerns about Emwazi being named, she said: “The point I would make is that there is an ongoing investigation. It is absolutely right that we allow the police and security agencies to do all they can to bring those responsible to justice and help keep British people safe.”

As early as September last year, MI5 and the FBI had identified Emwazi as the masked killer. They did not make his name public mainly because of fears about the impact his identification might have on hostages being held by Islamic State. A secondary reason was concern over the safety of Emwazi’s family in the UK, in case of retaliation.

The intelligence agencies are unable to comment on the claim that it tried to recruit Emwazi, in part because the killings of the hostages by his grouping are still a matter of police investigation. But the parliamentary intelligence and security committee report into the Lee Rigby murder sets out the agency’s position.

The intelligence committee wrote: “Agents are one of MI5’s most important sources of intelligence. MI5 often approaches subjects of interest (SoIs) in order to try to recruit them as agents.”

According to people who have moved in jihadi circles in west London, Emwazi began to be noticed about five or six years ago. “That’s when he emerged, so to speak,” said one. Among his associates at that time was Bilal el-Berjawi, a Londoner of Lebanese origin who was killed by a drone strike in Somalia three years ago.

In August 2009, Emwazi went on a supposed safari holiday to Tanzania, but on landing in the capital he said he was detained by police and held overnight.

In a series of statements to Cage, which campaigns on behalf of communities affected by the “war on terror”, Emwazi alleged he was threatened with beatings by gun-toting members of Tanzania’s security forces.

After being refused entry to Tanzania he was put on a plane to the Netherlands, where he said he was questioned by an MI5 agent named “Nick” who accused him of wanting to fight in Somalia, where the militant group al-Shabaab operates in the southern part of the country.

In emails seen by the Guardian, Emwazi said the British agent knew “everything about me; where I lived, what I did, and the people I hang around with”. He is then claimed to have tried to “turn” Emwazi, asking: “Why don’t you work for us?” When he refused, MI5 said “life would be harder for you”.

Emwazi remained entangled with MI5. Over the next few months, he was again detained and interrogated.

Emwazi decided to move to Kuwait, where he landed a job working for a computer company, according to the emails he wrote to Cage. He came back to London twice, the second time to finalise his wedding plans to a woman in Kuwait.

In June 2010, however, counter-terrorism officials in Britain detained him again – this time fingerprinting him and searching his belongings. When he tried to fly back to Kuwait the next day, he was prevented from doing so. In his final interrogation he claimed to have been strangled by a police officer.

Emwazi is thought to have been incensed by the decision to bar him from Kuwait, the land of his birth, and where he had worked and planned to marry.

“I had a job waiting for me and marriage to get started,” he wrote in a June 2010 email to Cage. But now “I feel like a prisoner, only not in a cage, in London. A person imprisoned & controlled by security service men, stopping me from living my new life in my birthplace & country, Kuwait.”Cage said that it spent two years communicating with Emwazi, in which he highlighted interference by the UK security agencies as he sought to find redress within the system.

He told the organisation: “I have been trying to find out the reason for my refused visa issue from my home country Kuwait, and a way to solve the issue. So through my friends in Kuwait, it has been said to me that Kuwait has no problem with me entering, and the reason for my refusal is simply because the UK agents have told them to not let me in!!”

Asim Qureshi, research director of Cage, said there were parallels with the killer of Lee Rigby, Michael Adebolajo.

“Suffocating domestic policies aimed at turning a person into an informant but which prevent a person from fulfilling their basic life needs would have left a lasting impression on Emwazi. He desperately wanted to use the system to change his situation, but the system ultimately rejected him.”

But a leading researcher into counter-terrorism and intelligence, Shashank Joshi of the London-based Royal United Services Institute, said it was MI5’s job to recruit informers.

He rejected the Cage narrative of radicalisation by the British state as simplistic. “It seems to me MI5 did a reasonable job,” Joshi said. MI5 had enough evidence to show Emwazi was associated with radical elements early on and had good reason to watch him, he said.

He desperately wanted to use the system to change his situation, but the system ultimately rejected him

Asim Qureshi, of Cage

Close friends of Emwazi told the Post that his situation in London had made him desperate to leave the country. It is unclear exactly when he reached Syria or how.

One friend said he believed Emwazi wanted to travel to Saudi Arabia to teach English in 2012 but was unsuccessful. He left soon afterwards, the friend said.

“He was upset and wanted to start a life elsewhere,” one of the friends said. “He at some stage reached the point where he was really just trying to find another way to get out.”

By 2012 he told friends he wanted to go to Syria. Almost all advised him against it.

Before he was named publicly, web searches for his name brought up only results from the electoral roll, listing various west London addresses where he lived with his family.

Similarly, his brother’s Facebook account has been deleted, as have various social media, and UK LinkedIn profiles connected to his sister, though she now appears to have a new, Kuwait-based LinkedIn page.

Emwazi and Berjawi were members of a loose-knit group of young Muslims from the North Kensington area of west London who attended the same mosques and played five-a-side football together.

Another member of the group, Mohamed Sakr, was killed in a drone strike in Somalia a few weeks after Berjawi. Although born in the UK, he was a dual UK-Egyptian national; the UK government had stripped him of his British citizenship shortly before he was killed.

Some members of this group were investigated by MI5 because of their links with the men who attempted to carry out a wave of bombings on London’s underground train network on 21 July 2005.

Others came to the attention of the authorities in other ways. Mohammed Ezzouek, for example, who attended North Westminster Community school with Berjawi, was interrogated by British intelligence officers after a trip to Somalia in 2006; another schoolmate, Tariq al-Daour, has been released from jail after serving a sentence for inciting terrorism.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/banksy-puts-new-works-amidst-bombed-out-ruins-palestineBanksy Puts Up New Works Amidst the Bombed-Out Ruins of Palestinehttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/86031251/0/alternet_world~Banksy-Puts-Up-New-Works-Amidst-the-BombedOut-Ruins-of-Palestine

The artist offers a satirically upbeat travelogue of the devastation in Gaza.

Street artist Banksy posted photos and a short film on his website of works he recently put up in the streets of Palestine. In the aforementioned mini-documentary, the artist offers a satirical travelogue of Gaza’s bombed-out ruins.

One photograph depicts a Banksy mural of a kitten. The UK artist includes a caption:

"A local man came up and said 'Please - what does this mean?' I explained I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens."

The video, satirically titled “‪Make this the year YOU discover a new destination,” features onscreen text welcoming viewers to Gaza and observations such as “Locals like it so much they never leave (Because they’re not allowed to)” and “Development opportunities are everywhere (No cement has been allowed into Gaza since the bombing).”

This is the second time Banksy has posted work in Palestine. In 2005, the artist left a series of images on the West Bank Wall.

You can check out the mini-documentary and some of the most recent images below. To see all of the new pieces, visit Banksy’s website.

The artist offers a satirically upbeat travelogue of the devastation in Gaza.

Street artist Banksy posted photos and a short film on his website of works he recently put up in the streets of Palestine. In the aforementioned mini-documentary, the artist offers a satirical travelogue of Gaza’s bombed-out ruins.

One photograph depicts a Banksy mural of a kitten. The UK artist includes a caption:

"A local man came up and said 'Please - what does this mean?' I explained I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet people only look at pictures of kittens."

The video, satirically titled “‪Make this the year YOU discover a new destination,” features onscreen text welcoming viewers to Gaza and observations such as “Locals like it so much they never leave (Because they’re not allowed to)” and “Development opportunities are everywhere (No cement has been allowed into Gaza since the bombing).”

This is the second time Banksy has posted work in Palestine. In 2005, the artist left a series of images on the West Bank Wall.

You can check out the mini-documentary and some of the most recent images below. To see all of the new pieces, visit Banksy’s website.

]]>
http://www.alternet.org/environment/us-fast-tracking-its-way-toxic-nightmareIs the U.S. 'Fast-tracking' Its Way to a Toxic Nightmare?http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/86266632/0/alternet_world~Is-the-US-Fasttracking-Its-Way-to-a-Toxic-Nightmare

The EU prohibits many harmful ingredients America allows. But multinational corporations are looking to change that and the TPP would allow them to.

A speaker at an event I recently attended asked why U.S. food companies put butylated hydroxyltoluene, a food preservative and endocrine disruptor, in cereal sold stateside, while in Europe the same companies formulate the same product without BHT.

Well-informed European citizens have organized and pushed for those regulations.

U.S. citizens have not yet pushed for such regulations in sufficient numbers.

The precautionary principle is an approach to risk management which places the burden of proof to demonstrate a product or ingredient's safety on the corporations that produces the product— prior to releasing it to the public. Over the last few decades, the U.S. has become lax with this approach while Europe proceeds with a greater amount of caution. But that contrast may not survive efforts by the U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and multinational corporations, which are currently negotiating super trade treaties behind closed doors.

Such treaties are enacted by Congress through what’s known as “fast-track” legislation, meaning that the President negotiates trade agreements and Congress can only approve or disapprove, but cannot amend or filibuster the legislation.

According to sources at the negotiations of these treaties, the provisions in them may well eradicate the EU’s higher standards. Instead of getting the BHT and other questionable additives out of American products, the negotiated language will likely “harmonize barriers to trade,” meaning corporations can put all the bad stuff in European products that they can’t now.

Many Europeans vehemently oppose such trade deals because the mainstream media is extensively covering them. Here in the U.S., however, there’s pretty much a coverage blackout except for MSNBC’sThe Ed Show.

Despite leaks, side conversations and Wikileaks revelations that have given experts the opportunity to assess the deals, the American media and public don’t seem too concerned about the outcome. But important questions remain. Let’s begin with the obvious: Why are these deals secret? And why should ordinary citizens go along and trust that the secret handshake devised by corporations will serve the greater public good?

To borrow a phrase from the GMO labeling movement, we need to safeguard the public’s right to know. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about secret trade deals or the contents of food, shampoo, building products, industrial emissions, knowledge protects us.

Is Knowledge a Barrier to Trade?

While the most visible proponents of labeling are groups, like the Organic Consumers Organization, Food Democracy Now!, and Just Label It! which call for mandatory labeling of GMO-containing foods, GMOs are not the only food ingredients some people would like to see labeled in food. A small sample of others include:

Allergenic ingredients (like wheat or egg)

Pro-inflammatory ingredients (like MSG or food colorings)

Obesogenic substances (like high fructose corn syrup aka HCFS)

Other stuff that has not been well studied (or studied at all) like certain “flavors” or “fragrances”

It doesn’t end with food. Women purchasing cosmetics or face creams want to know whether they contain methyl parabens which studies find concentrated in cancerous tumors. Parents buying their children’s car seats or nursing pillows want assurances that these products don’t contain toxic flame retardants. Homeowners and office dwellers want to know if their building materials and furnishings contain toxins like phthalates, which are associated with damage to the liver, thyroid and reproductive system.

And let’s not forget the chemicals used in fracking, emissions from manufacturing plants and gas pipeline infrastructures, methane and carbon dioxide releases contributing to climate change, and nuclear waste. Whether it’s consumer goods, building materials, or the energy industries, toxic outputs need to be monitored for health and environmental impacts. That’s impossible to do without the right to know what they contain, emit or produce. The only way to track them is through product labeling.

Banning the Precautionary Principle

From the perspective of corporations, the less the public knows about what their products contain or emit, the better. When knowledge deters people from a product or process, the industry considers that knowledge a barrier to trade. And the new uber-trade deals, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are poised to be fast-tracked through Congress with a quick up or down vote, even before the treaties’ contents are made known to Congress or the public.

“Big chemical companies, pesticide manufacturers, the manufacturers of products which are associated with cancer, autism, learning disabilities in children, and a host of other serious illnesses are attempting to use these trade regulations to stop government regulations of dangerous chemicals all around the globe,” says William Waren, senior trade analyst with Friends of the Earth.

“When we can’t adequately quantify risk, the burden of proof is on the party that would introduce a potentially risky product to show that the risk is low enough to avoid harm public health and the environment,” he continues.

When the precautionary principle is dismantled, as it is in U.S. policy, companies make it the public’s responsibility to show harm. Unless people go to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate a safety problem, corporations have no responsibility to guarantee safety.

In the void left by our nation’s failure to regulate, some states, such as California, have taken it upon themselves to regulate toxic chemicals. The California Environmental Quality Act requires that “no projects which would cause significant environmental effects should be approved as proposed if there are feasible alternatives or mitigation measures that would lessen those effects,” and “environmental impact reports shall be used to provide full public disclosure of the environmental impacts of a proposed project.”

“It’s incremental but it’s real important, given the incapacity of the EPA to act,” notes Waren.

Waren says that the “Technical Barriers to Trade” chapters in treaties would also enact stringent limits on all governments, rolling back product safety regulations in Europe and elsewhere and freeze in place the current ineffective U.S. federal regulations. In addition, state regulations would be rolled back or nullified.

Europeans would have to eat their BHT and like it. No longer able to study health or environmental impacts, under threat of lawsuits by international trade tribunals, Californians would not be empowered to prevent fracking companies from dumping fracking waste into water aquifers—as recently occurred in Central Valley, California.

“This is one of the leading negotiating points for the U.S. and they are making a lot of headway,” says Waren. “The whole question of rolling back state and local safeguards on food and the environment is a very, very important one because a lot of states have already acted in various ways, like New York which banned fracking.”

The EU prohibits many harmful ingredients America allows. But multinational corporations are looking to change that and the TPP would allow them to.

A speaker at an event I recently attended asked why U.S. food companies put butylated hydroxyltoluene, a food preservative and endocrine disruptor, in cereal sold stateside, while in Europe the same companies formulate the same product without BHT.

Well-informed European citizens have organized and pushed for those regulations.

U.S. citizens have not yet pushed for such regulations in sufficient numbers.

The precautionary principle is an approach to risk management which places the burden of proof to demonstrate a product or ingredient's safety on the corporations that produces the product— prior to releasing it to the public. Over the last few decades, the U.S. has become lax with this approach while Europe proceeds with a greater amount of caution. But that contrast may not survive efforts by the U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman and multinational corporations, which are currently negotiating super trade treaties behind closed doors.

Such treaties are enacted by Congress through what’s known as “fast-track” legislation, meaning that the President negotiates trade agreements and Congress can only approve or disapprove, but cannot amend or filibuster the legislation.

According to sources at the negotiations of these treaties, the provisions in them may well eradicate the EU’s higher standards. Instead of getting the BHT and other questionable additives out of American products, the negotiated language will likely “harmonize barriers to trade,” meaning corporations can put all the bad stuff in European products that they can’t now.

Many Europeans vehemently oppose such trade deals because the mainstream media is extensively covering them. Here in the U.S., however, there’s pretty much a coverage blackout except for MSNBC’sThe Ed Show.

Despite leaks, side conversations and Wikileaks revelations that have given experts the opportunity to assess the deals, the American media and public don’t seem too concerned about the outcome. But important questions remain. Let’s begin with the obvious: Why are these deals secret? And why should ordinary citizens go along and trust that the secret handshake devised by corporations will serve the greater public good?

To borrow a phrase from the GMO labeling movement, we need to safeguard the public’s right to know. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about secret trade deals or the contents of food, shampoo, building products, industrial emissions, knowledge protects us.

Is Knowledge a Barrier to Trade?

While the most visible proponents of labeling are groups, like the Organic Consumers Organization, Food Democracy Now!, and Just Label It! which call for mandatory labeling of GMO-containing foods, GMOs are not the only food ingredients some people would like to see labeled in food. A small sample of others include:

Allergenic ingredients (like wheat or egg)

Pro-inflammatory ingredients (like MSG or food colorings)

Obesogenic substances (like high fructose corn syrup aka HCFS)

Other stuff that has not been well studied (or studied at all) like certain “flavors” or “fragrances”

It doesn’t end with food. Women purchasing cosmetics or face creams want to know whether they contain methyl parabens which studies find concentrated in cancerous tumors. Parents buying their children’s car seats or nursing pillows want assurances that these products don’t contain toxic flame retardants. Homeowners and office dwellers want to know if their building materials and furnishings contain toxins like phthalates, which are associated with damage to the liver, thyroid and reproductive system.

And let’s not forget the chemicals used in fracking, emissions from manufacturing plants and gas pipeline infrastructures, methane and carbon dioxide releases contributing to climate change, and nuclear waste. Whether it’s consumer goods, building materials, or the energy industries, toxic outputs need to be monitored for health and environmental impacts. That’s impossible to do without the right to know what they contain, emit or produce. The only way to track them is through product labeling.

Banning the Precautionary Principle

From the perspective of corporations, the less the public knows about what their products contain or emit, the better. When knowledge deters people from a product or process, the industry considers that knowledge a barrier to trade. And the new uber-trade deals, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) and Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are poised to be fast-tracked through Congress with a quick up or down vote, even before the treaties’ contents are made known to Congress or the public.

“Big chemical companies, pesticide manufacturers, the manufacturers of products which are associated with cancer, autism, learning disabilities in children, and a host of other serious illnesses are attempting to use these trade regulations to stop government regulations of dangerous chemicals all around the globe,” says William Waren, senior trade analyst with Friends of the Earth.

“When we can’t adequately quantify risk, the burden of proof is on the party that would introduce a potentially risky product to show that the risk is low enough to avoid harm public health and the environment,” he continues.

When the precautionary principle is dismantled, as it is in U.S. policy, companies make it the public’s responsibility to show harm. Unless people go to extraordinary lengths to demonstrate a safety problem, corporations have no responsibility to guarantee safety.

In the void left by our nation’s failure to regulate, some states, such as California, have taken it upon themselves to regulate toxic chemicals. The California Environmental Quality Act requires that “no projects which would cause significant environmental effects should be approved as proposed if there are feasible alternatives or mitigation measures that would lessen those effects,” and “environmental impact reports shall be used to provide full public disclosure of the environmental impacts of a proposed project.”

“It’s incremental but it’s real important, given the incapacity of the EPA to act,” notes Waren.

Waren says that the “Technical Barriers to Trade” chapters in treaties would also enact stringent limits on all governments, rolling back product safety regulations in Europe and elsewhere and freeze in place the current ineffective U.S. federal regulations. In addition, state regulations would be rolled back or nullified.

Europeans would have to eat their BHT and like it. No longer able to study health or environmental impacts, under threat of lawsuits by international trade tribunals, Californians would not be empowered to prevent fracking companies from dumping fracking waste into water aquifers—as recently occurred in Central Valley, California.

“This is one of the leading negotiating points for the U.S. and they are making a lot of headway,” says Waren. “The whole question of rolling back state and local safeguards on food and the environment is a very, very important one because a lot of states have already acted in various ways, like New York which banned fracking.”

As for those in the K Street elite pushing Uncle Sam to confront the bear, it isn’t hard to see what they have to gain.

There’s a familiar ring to the U.S. calls to arm Ukraine’s post-coup government. That’s because the same big-money players who stand to benefit from belligerent relations with Russia haven’t forgotten a favorite Cold War tune.

President Obama has said that he won’t rule out arming Ukraine if a recent truce, which has all but evaporated, fails like its predecessor. His comments echoed the advice of a report issued a week prior by three prominent U.S. think tanks: the Brookings Institute, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Atlantic Council. The report advocated sending $1 billion worth of “defensive” military assistance to Kiev’s pro-Western government.

If followed, those recommendations would bring the U.S. and Russia the closest to conflict since the heyday of the Cold War. Russia has said that it would “respond asymmetrically against Washington or its allies on other fronts” if the U.S. supplies weapons to Kiev.

The powers with the most skin in the game—France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine—struck a deal on Feb. 12, which outlines the terms for a ceasefire between Kiev and the pro-Russian, breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. It envisages a withdrawal of heavy weaponry followed by local elections and constitutional reform by the end of 2015, granting more autonomy to the eastern regions.

But not all is quiet on the eastern front. The truce appears to be headed the route of a nearly identical compromise in September, which broke down immediately afterward.

As for those in the K Street elite pushing Uncle Sam to confront the bear, it isn’t hard to see what they have to gain. Just take a look below at the blow-by-blow history of their Beltway-bandit benefactors:

No Reds Means Seeing Red

Following the end of the Cold War, defense cuts had presented bottom-line problems for America’s military producers. The weapons dealers were told that they had to massively restructure or go bust.

Luckily, carrots were offered. Norm Augustine, a former undersecretary of the Army, advised Defense Secretary William Perry to cover the costs of the industry mergers. Augustine was then the CEO of Martin Marietta — soon to become the head of Lockheed Martin, thanks to the subsidies.

Augustine was also chairman of a Pentagon advisory council on arms-export policy. In that capacity, he was able to secure yet more subsidy guarantees for NATO-compatible weapons sales to former Warsaw Pact countries.

But in order to buy the types of expensive weapons that would stabilize the industry’s books, those countries had to enter into an alliance with the U.S. And some members of Congress were still wary of shelling out money to expand a military alliance that had, on its face, no rationale to exist.

Enter the NATO Expansion Squad

Enter the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. Formed in 1996, the Committee wined and dined elected officials to secure their support for NATO enlargement. Meanwhile, Lockheed buttressed its efforts by spending $1.58 million in federal contributions for the 1996 campaign cycle.

The Committee’s founder and neocon chairman, Bruce Jackson, was so principled in his desire to see freedom around the globe that he didn’t even take a salary. He didn’t have to; he was a vice president at Lockheed Martin.

By Clinton’s second term, everyone was on board. Ron Asmus, a former RAND Corporation analyst and the “intellectual progenitor” of NATO expansion (who would later co-chair the Committee to Expand NATO), ended what was left of the policy debate in the State Department. He worked with Clinton’s diplomatic point man on Eastern Europe, Strobe Talbott.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were all in NATO come 1999. The Baltic States would soon follow. By 2003, those initial inductees had arranged deals to buy just short of $5 billion in fighter jets from Lockheed.

Bruce Jackson began running a new outfit in 2002. It was called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

(36 F-16s are currently slated for delivery to Iraq at an estimated $3 billion.)

Rivers of Cash

Brookings is Washington’s oldest think tank. For most of its existence, its research was funded by a large endowment and no-strings-attached grants. But all of that changed when Strobe Talbott took the reins.

• Among the many corporate donors to Brookings are Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin and cyber-defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

David M. Rubenstein, Co-Chairman of Board of Trustees

• Rubenstein is co-founder and co-CEO at the Carlyle Group, a massive private equity firm. Among the companies in which Carlyle has a controlling stake in is Booz Allen Hamilton — a military and intelligence IT firm that is currently active in Ukraine.

• Booz, which both sells to and operates within the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus, counts four former Carlyle executives among its directors. Ronald Sanders, a vice president at Booz, serves on the faculty of Brookings.

Atlanticists

The Atlantic Council was formed in 1961 as a “consolidation of the U.S. citizen groups supporting” NATO, according to its website.

Stephen Hadley, Director

• A former national security advisor for George W. Bush, Hadley doubles as a director for Raytheon. He was also the driving force behind the creation of the U.S. Committee on NATO, on whose board he sat, and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

• A retired general and former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Cartwright has an active work life. He’s “an advisor to defense and intelligence contractor TASC, defense consulting firm Accenture, and Enlightenment Capital, a private equity firm with defense investments,” according to the Public Accountability Initiative. He’s also on the board of Raytheon, which earned him $124,000 in 2012.

Other notables include:

• Nicholas Burns – former diplomat and current senior counselor at The Cohen Group, which advises Lockheed Martin, among other defense companies

• James A. Baker III – Bush 41 Secretary of State and partner at law firm Baker Botts. Clients include a slew of defense companies

• Thomas R. Pickering – former senior vice president for Boeing

Chi-town Chickenhawks

Founded in 1922, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has since served as the premier voice of Midwest business leaders in American foreign policy. Jeb Bush recently made his “I am my own man” speech, outlining his foreign policy priorities, to the council:

Lester Crown, Chairman

• The chair of Henry Crown & Co., the investment firm that handles the fortune started by his father, Henry Crown. Henry put the “dynamic” in General Dynamics, helping to turn it into the world’s largest weapons manufacturer by the time Lester became its chairman in 1986. The defense behemoth remains the single largest source of the family’s treasure; they’re currently the 35th richest clan in America. General Dynamics produces all of the equipment types proposed for transfer to Ukraine in the think-tank report.

Ivo Daalder, President

• A co-author of the report, Daalder is a former diplomat and staffer on Clinton’s National Security Council. He later served on the Hart-Rudman Commission from 1998-2001. It was chartered by Defense Secretary William Cohen—later to become a Lockheed consultant—and tasked with outlining the major shifts in national security strategy for the 21st century. Among its commissioners was none other than Norm Augustine.

The commission concluded that the Department of Defense and intelligence community should drastically reduce their infrastructure costs by outsourcing and privatizing key functions, especially in the field of information technology.

General Dynamics’ revenue tripled between 2000 and 2010 as it acquired at least 11 smaller firms that specialized in exactly the sort of services recommended for outsourcing. Roughly one-third of GD’s overall revenue in 2013, the same year that Daalder was appointed president of the Council by Crown, came from its Information Systems and Technology division.

So even without a Cold War Bear to fuel spending, the re-imagining of that old foe is oiling the revolving door between the government and defense contractors.

As for those in the K Street elite pushing Uncle Sam to confront the bear, it isn’t hard to see what they have to gain.

There’s a familiar ring to the U.S. calls to arm Ukraine’s post-coup government. That’s because the same big-money players who stand to benefit from belligerent relations with Russia haven’t forgotten a favorite Cold War tune.

President Obama has said that he won’t rule out arming Ukraine if a recent truce, which has all but evaporated, fails like its predecessor. His comments echoed the advice of a report issued a week prior by three prominent U.S. think tanks: the Brookings Institute, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and the Atlantic Council. The report advocated sending $1 billion worth of “defensive” military assistance to Kiev’s pro-Western government.

If followed, those recommendations would bring the U.S. and Russia the closest to conflict since the heyday of the Cold War. Russia has said that it would “respond asymmetrically against Washington or its allies on other fronts” if the U.S. supplies weapons to Kiev.

The powers with the most skin in the game—France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine—struck a deal on Feb. 12, which outlines the terms for a ceasefire between Kiev and the pro-Russian, breakaway provinces in eastern Ukraine. It envisages a withdrawal of heavy weaponry followed by local elections and constitutional reform by the end of 2015, granting more autonomy to the eastern regions.

But not all is quiet on the eastern front. The truce appears to be headed the route of a nearly identical compromise in September, which broke down immediately afterward.

As for those in the K Street elite pushing Uncle Sam to confront the bear, it isn’t hard to see what they have to gain. Just take a look below at the blow-by-blow history of their Beltway-bandit benefactors:

No Reds Means Seeing Red

Following the end of the Cold War, defense cuts had presented bottom-line problems for America’s military producers. The weapons dealers were told that they had to massively restructure or go bust.

Luckily, carrots were offered. Norm Augustine, a former undersecretary of the Army, advised Defense Secretary William Perry to cover the costs of the industry mergers. Augustine was then the CEO of Martin Marietta — soon to become the head of Lockheed Martin, thanks to the subsidies.

Augustine was also chairman of a Pentagon advisory council on arms-export policy. In that capacity, he was able to secure yet more subsidy guarantees for NATO-compatible weapons sales to former Warsaw Pact countries.

But in order to buy the types of expensive weapons that would stabilize the industry’s books, those countries had to enter into an alliance with the U.S. And some members of Congress were still wary of shelling out money to expand a military alliance that had, on its face, no rationale to exist.

Enter the NATO Expansion Squad

Enter the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO. Formed in 1996, the Committee wined and dined elected officials to secure their support for NATO enlargement. Meanwhile, Lockheed buttressed its efforts by spending $1.58 million in federal contributions for the 1996 campaign cycle.

The Committee’s founder and neocon chairman, Bruce Jackson, was so principled in his desire to see freedom around the globe that he didn’t even take a salary. He didn’t have to; he was a vice president at Lockheed Martin.

By Clinton’s second term, everyone was on board. Ron Asmus, a former RAND Corporation analyst and the “intellectual progenitor” of NATO expansion (who would later co-chair the Committee to Expand NATO), ended what was left of the policy debate in the State Department. He worked with Clinton’s diplomatic point man on Eastern Europe, Strobe Talbott.

Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic were all in NATO come 1999. The Baltic States would soon follow. By 2003, those initial inductees had arranged deals to buy just short of $5 billion in fighter jets from Lockheed.

Bruce Jackson began running a new outfit in 2002. It was called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

(36 F-16s are currently slated for delivery to Iraq at an estimated $3 billion.)

Rivers of Cash

Brookings is Washington’s oldest think tank. For most of its existence, its research was funded by a large endowment and no-strings-attached grants. But all of that changed when Strobe Talbott took the reins.

• Among the many corporate donors to Brookings are Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Northrup Grumman, Lockheed Martin and cyber-defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton.

David M. Rubenstein, Co-Chairman of Board of Trustees

• Rubenstein is co-founder and co-CEO at the Carlyle Group, a massive private equity firm. Among the companies in which Carlyle has a controlling stake in is Booz Allen Hamilton — a military and intelligence IT firm that is currently active in Ukraine.

• Booz, which both sells to and operates within the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus, counts four former Carlyle executives among its directors. Ronald Sanders, a vice president at Booz, serves on the faculty of Brookings.

Atlanticists

The Atlantic Council was formed in 1961 as a “consolidation of the U.S. citizen groups supporting” NATO, according to its website.

Stephen Hadley, Director

• A former national security advisor for George W. Bush, Hadley doubles as a director for Raytheon. He was also the driving force behind the creation of the U.S. Committee on NATO, on whose board he sat, and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

• A retired general and former vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Cartwright has an active work life. He’s “an advisor to defense and intelligence contractor TASC, defense consulting firm Accenture, and Enlightenment Capital, a private equity firm with defense investments,” according to the Public Accountability Initiative. He’s also on the board of Raytheon, which earned him $124,000 in 2012.

Other notables include:

• Nicholas Burns – former diplomat and current senior counselor at The Cohen Group, which advises Lockheed Martin, among other defense companies

• James A. Baker III – Bush 41 Secretary of State and partner at law firm Baker Botts. Clients include a slew of defense companies

• Thomas R. Pickering – former senior vice president for Boeing

Chi-town Chickenhawks

Founded in 1922, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs has since served as the premier voice of Midwest business leaders in American foreign policy. Jeb Bush recently made his “I am my own man” speech, outlining his foreign policy priorities, to the council:

Lester Crown, Chairman

• The chair of Henry Crown & Co., the investment firm that handles the fortune started by his father, Henry Crown. Henry put the “dynamic” in General Dynamics, helping to turn it into the world’s largest weapons manufacturer by the time Lester became its chairman in 1986. The defense behemoth remains the single largest source of the family’s treasure; they’re currently the 35th richest clan in America. General Dynamics produces all of the equipment types proposed for transfer to Ukraine in the think-tank report.

Ivo Daalder, President

• A co-author of the report, Daalder is a former diplomat and staffer on Clinton’s National Security Council. He later served on the Hart-Rudman Commission from 1998-2001. It was chartered by Defense Secretary William Cohen—later to become a Lockheed consultant—and tasked with outlining the major shifts in national security strategy for the 21st century. Among its commissioners was none other than Norm Augustine.

The commission concluded that the Department of Defense and intelligence community should drastically reduce their infrastructure costs by outsourcing and privatizing key functions, especially in the field of information technology.

General Dynamics’ revenue tripled between 2000 and 2010 as it acquired at least 11 smaller firms that specialized in exactly the sort of services recommended for outsourcing. Roughly one-third of GD’s overall revenue in 2013, the same year that Daalder was appointed president of the Council by Crown, came from its Information Systems and Technology division.

So even without a Cold War Bear to fuel spending, the re-imagining of that old foe is oiling the revolving door between the government and defense contractors.

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http://www.alternet.org/world/city-privatized-itself-deathThe City that Privatized Itself to Deathhttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/85956220/0/alternet_world~The-City-that-Privatized-Itself-to-Death

Bit by bit, London has been handed over to pinstriped investors ‘reeking of lunch.'

I wonder what in 100 years from now it will be, London. The city that privatised itself to death. Abandoned to nature, maybe, the whole place a massive, feral version of that mimsy garden bridge over the Thames currently being planned by the giggling classes. Poor London, the ancient and forgotten metropolis, crumbling slowly into an enchanted urban forest.

Imagine. In 2115, all the lab-conjured animals in Regent’s Park Jurassic Zoo are free to roam, reliving their evolution. A diplodocus there, grazing in the jungled Mall. Look, a stegosaurus asleep in the ruins of Buckingham Palace. High above the forest canopy, a lone archaeopteryx soars, where once hundreds of drones glided through YouTubed firework displays.

Perhaps eminent historians will study London in the early 21st century, see how its poorer inhabitants were driven out, observe how its built environment was slowly boiled to death by privatisation. And they will wonder why people tolerated this transfer of collective wealth from taxpayers to shareholders. And they will perhaps turn their attention to Eduardo Paolozzi’s fabled mosaics at Tottenham Court Road underground station.

Back in 2015, a debate has bubbled briefly, after some of these lovely, publicly owned mosaic murals were quietly dismantled as part of the station’s thorough £400m Crossrail seeing-to. I say “debate”; it was really only that polarised quackbait thing we have now: Click If You Think The Mosaics Are Great, We Should Save What’s Left Of Them v Smash Them Up They’re Ugly, Anyway Who Cares It’s Just Patterns On A Wall.

Arguments about the aesthetics of Paolozzi’s mosaics missed the point, it seemed to me, which has less to do with the merit of the art itself and more to do with what, in the long run, it turned out the art was for. Paolozzi’s legacy had stood intact for three decades. Not just as 1,000 sq m of charming, optimistic art, but as 1,000 sq m of commercial retardant.

You can’t paste an ad on to a wallful of public art. You can’t fix one of those irritating micromovies over it, telling a vacuous five-second story about investments or vitamins or hair. The Paolozzi mosaics went up as decorative art, just as privatisation was about to explode like a dirty bomb all over the public realm. What survives at Tottenham Court Road station is a brave, forlorn little seawall set against a stormtide of corporate advertising.

1982 it was, when those mosaics were unveiled. British Petroleum had already been privatised. British Aerospace, too, and a slew of others. The right to buy had been introduced a couple of years earlier. Still to come: BT, ports, buses, British Leyland, British Steel, Rover, gas, electricity, water, the railways. All those non-coloured Monopoly cards? Wait, wait, you can’t privatise those, they’re public utilities, clue’s in the name, oh, too late. It was a free-market frenzy. Everything we owned was being flogged off by pinstriped bastards reeking of lunch.

I say “we”, although the greatest trick Thatcherism ever pulled was this redefinition of “us and them”. Suddenly, people in your own family were voting Tory. Mrs Thatcher’s chief information officer, Rupert Murdoch, was telling us that the firemen and the dustmen were our enemies. That the women of the NUT and Nalgo were the mad, selfish defenders of a doomed elite. The Tory government went after the local authorities, telling us that government itself was our enemy. You were just going: “Hold on a minute, if you’re the government …” and then they shouted: “Oh, God, look! The Falklands!”, hired more expensive PR guys and carried on privatising. All through the reign of Margaret the Baby-Eater. Through John Major’s steady-as-you-go age of dinge. And into the sunlit uplands of Blairvana where, ingeniously, the government launched a full-scale privatisation of the future: the public finance initiative. Of all the Tory policies adopted by the Labour government, none was Torier than PFI. This policy wore a black cape and a top hat. It twirled a moustache and cackled. “Oh, you’d like a hospital? Allow me to build one for you, no charge. Just rent it back from us for, let’s say, 50 years, plus service charges; exactly, minister, why worry, you’ll be out of the cabinet and on our board soon enough. Waiter! We’ll see the pudding menu now …” Instead of snapping this brittle cack in half and binning it, Labour embarked on a massive PFI expansion. Now our children owe billions to PFI shareholders, and it’s no consolation at all to think that our grandchildren will, too.

But there was a time when “we” were winning. The “we” I always understood to be “us”, that is. The collective us. Before the privatisation of air and space. Let me tell you, little ones, about how popular music and the bright optimism of collective space came together long ago in London’s heady, soot-laden, pre-privatised air of 1967. Song of the summer was Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks, with its odd blend of keening melancholy and positivism. Nostalgia for a doomed postwar world, exhilaration for the coming of a new post-industrial one. Terry and Julie, facing the future unafraid. Wherever you went, it floated into earshot on a tide of treble from someone’s transistor radio.

And if you were Terry and Julie gazing at a Waterloo sunset in the summer of 67, you’d have seen the Hayward Gallery under construction. The beautiful, brilliant, brutalist Hayward, part of a people’s South Bank that had started with the Festival Hall in 1951 and would end triumphantly with the National Theatre in the 1970s. And we did gaze at it, thinking: “This is us.” This is us, building something amazing, for us. Several eminent architects worked on the scheme, but oversight belonged to the GLC architects department. Imagine that. A time when most architects worked in the public sector, designing a world of public space and collective aspiration, a world of affordable housing with statutory space standards. Crazy days, when a giant yellow Aviva ad on the NT’s western wall was unimaginable.

Then, suddenly, architecture, like everything else, was privatised. The 1980s saw deregulation, not only of the financial markets, but also of the professions. The number of local-authority architects plummeted under a regime of cuts; the harsh winter of recession in 1990 finished them off. From now on, space and air would be shaped and primped by the private sector. Architecture was redefined: no longer frozen music, but petrified Thatcherism. The client’s brief was to choke as much value out of a site as possible, and the model was Broadgate. That shoulder-padded yuppie citadel, which unlocked so much subsequent property value in east London. It seems so weird that it’s old enough now – 30 years – to be listed as a historic building itself, even as it continues to grow, ever more offices cramming in, and a fortune being made from it, somewhere, by tanned people with watchful lawyers.

Very few people now remember what was there before – Broad Street railway station and its environs. The station architecture wasn’t particularly distinguished, but that wasn’t the loss. It was the space, 32 acres of nationalised space and air, once managed by us as a part of a nationalised industry.

Broadgate looks great in photographs, particularly in night shots. The little central public space, the little public ice rink. Lovely. But this space was and remains a concession, a “planning gain” to sweeten the deal. Look, nobody’s suggesting that Broadgate should have been a 32-acre ornamental garden, as attractive as that sounds. Wait, actually, yeah: public gardens would have been fantastic, come to think of it. However, of course the city needs offices. And Arup’s Peter Foggo, highly regarded in the profession, designed much of Broadgate. It looks pretty good, which is why the architectural historians want to save it.

But it has nothing to do with us, does it? It’s privatised space and air. Broadgate became a template for capitalism. Broad Street station, British Rail, everything we owned at the time was sold off cheaply to developers, who then sanctimoniously sold us back this narrative of humane regeneration and philanthropy. Hire an eminent architect, stick a public garden in the middle, bosh. Done. We swallowed the lot. Loadsamoney, planner-friendly, enlightened patronage. Suddenly entrepreneurs were “patrons of the arts”. Of course they were. That’s where the money was.

And as more of what used to belong to “us” was sold off and developed by “them”, the hunger for floorplates and square footage and award-winning design and river views became insatiable. If they ran out of land to build on, no problem. They would now literally monetise thin air. The principle of “air rights” development in London was nailed by architect Terry Farrell’s Embankment Place. A client could commission a great design saturated with Farrell’s trademark postmodern wave-it-through-planning magic, acquire the air rights above Charing Cross station and whack a massive office block on the roof. Ingenious. A private incubus squatting on an anaesthetised public space.

Bit by bit, the city has been handed by us to them. It’s now acceptable for the privatised space of a shopping centre to be patrolled by private security. There are enforceable dress codes, which is a laugh, considering those ill-fitting security uniforms. No loitering – another hypocrisy, as that’s pretty much 100% of a security guard’s job. They’ll all have Tasers soon. A 2011 London Assembly report – Public Life in Private Hands: Managing London’s Public Space – said the mayor of London was concerned that “there is a growing trend towards the private management of publicly accessible space. Where this type of ‘corporatisation’ occurs, especially in the larger commercial developments, Londoners can feel themselves excluded from parts of their own city.”

That’s Boris Johnson there, the freewheeling ultra-Tory ox. Like me, like us, he’s having an emotional reaction to witnessing the very fabric of the city, and the air around it, and the economy around that, being aggregated into some vast equity milking parlour by the very arseholes who smashed everything to bits the last time. Obviously, the mayor simply wants them to behave in a more gentlemanly fashion, whereas some of us want them roughly arrested, electronically tagged and confined to their extinct volcano lairs, but it’s nice to know we’re on the same page.

Oh, man, and just look at London’s privatised skyline. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so cartoonishly tragic. This one looks like a Nespresso machine. And that one, a cigar, is it? Potato? Full nappy? The utter capitulation of London’s planning system in the face of serious money is detectable right there in that infantile, random collection of improbable sex toys poking gormlessly into the privatised air. Public access? Yeah, we’ll definitely put a public park at the top (by appointment only). Oh, absolutely, we are ALL about community engagement: members of the public are welcome to visit our viewing gallery in the sky, that’ll be 30 quid, madam.

The great modernist architectural mantra is “form follows function”. I think we can safely call time on that one, don’t you? What could possibly be going on in that skyscraper? What would compel it to resemble a Shewee? Are you kidding? Architecture, you’re drunk, as usual, on one gin and tonic.

Oh, I know there are those who say it doesn’t matter that all this towering sequestered air belongs to them and not to us, that ownership doesn’t alter the way the world looks. Really? REALLY? I’d rather be the us who built the South Bank, than the them who built that skein of phlegm, the Shard. That scaly talon, that giant middle finger presented to us all. I loathe its banality. The view from inside is better (no visible Shard), but it feels as if you’re inside some giant advert for double glazing. I loathe its monstrous, bullying scale. It’s Gulliver big. End-of-level-boss big. Its stupid anything-goes-now size mocks us.

And how I loathe the rhetorical guff, as empty as that “ultra-prime” floorspace at the top of the building itself. Its architect, Renzo Piano, calls it “a vertical city”? Really? It’s not Milton bloody Keynes, is it? A city must contain members of the public. That’s basic. Well, there aren’t many members of the public in the Shard, and they’re easily identifiable. They’re either there for drinks and dinner or they’re there for a meeting. They’ve either got a table reservation or they’re wearing a lanyard. Cities don’t have guest lists. The Shard is not a city. Where’s the school, the hospital, the weird newsagent’s that sells tinned pies? Where’s the social housing, the dodgy pub, the library? Come on.

Yet the orthodoxy prevails. London must attract investment. It mustn’t upset the capricious bankers and fickle wankers of capitalism, the lease-for-lifers, the buy-to-leavers. A low, grey sky of resignation about privatisation has settled over us. But if history and economics teach us anything, it’s that we have absolutely no idea what happens next.

On the current track, maybe life does become unbearable in the future, when the last remaining cubic centimetre of public space – a trembling pocket of air perhaps, in a cellar at the Emirates British Library – is finally acquired by a friend of King Charles III. At some point, there’ll be no more space left to squeeze and monetise. The city’s overlords will own everything. Qatari, Saudi, Russian, Indian, Chinese, some UK hedge funds named after Shakespearian characters – all air will be their air.

In the future, the thin, sad air inside the last maglev night bus to Upminster, infused with metabolised alcohol, will be theirs. The dark, luxury air in the silent bedrooms of empty riverside apartments, their identical curving blocks clustered in threes and fours, grim and silent as gill slits, will be theirs. The once sacred air of St Paul’s Cathedral Spa and Pamperarium will be theirs.

Then – who knows? Maybe when London is pixellated into billions of stock-marketable units of sequestered air, boing! The world cracks and changes. Iceland acquires the north pole, discovers tons of diamonds and becomes the richest nation on earth. Ghana puts the first woman on Mars. Scientists announce they can convert rising sea levels into environmentally sustainable “brinergy”. The global petrochemical industry suffers a fatal prolapse. Its sheiks and warlords, the fawned-upon princes who once did as they wished – buying up most of Streatham in the morning, beheading someone for sorcery in the afternoon – well, they’re dust and shadow now. Maybe the global property market follows oil down the plughole. London’s last human inhabitants head north, their hovertransits stuffed with electronic belongings and omniplasma, to affordable housing, a temperate climate and a hopeful, collective future.

Or – who knows? Maybe the world economy goes tits up again, only this time we punish the rich instead of the poor. London’s part of a future that casts off the yoke of privatisation. Under new management. Ours. Imagine the London skyline repurposed as a collective landscape. A skyline where form no longer follows function, but where change of use might confer beauty.

Suppose those ridiculous blobs all over Waterloo’s sunset had different occupants. So a child points to the Shard and asks you what it’s for, and instead of trying to explain it’s half-full of dicks in haircuts “doing business”, you’re able to say it’s subsidised housing for key workers. Does it now magically become “architecturally beautiful”? Yes. YES.

And she points to the Gherkin and says: “What’s that?” and you say: “It’s a university.” What a beautiful world that would be. Maybe we can stop everything heading for a privatised wilderness. Let’s renationalise air.

Bit by bit, London has been handed over to pinstriped investors ‘reeking of lunch.'

I wonder what in 100 years from now it will be, London. The city that privatised itself to death. Abandoned to nature, maybe, the whole place a massive, feral version of that mimsy garden bridge over the Thames currently being planned by the giggling classes. Poor London, the ancient and forgotten metropolis, crumbling slowly into an enchanted urban forest.

Imagine. In 2115, all the lab-conjured animals in Regent’s Park Jurassic Zoo are free to roam, reliving their evolution. A diplodocus there, grazing in the jungled Mall. Look, a stegosaurus asleep in the ruins of Buckingham Palace. High above the forest canopy, a lone archaeopteryx soars, where once hundreds of drones glided through YouTubed firework displays.

Perhaps eminent historians will study London in the early 21st century, see how its poorer inhabitants were driven out, observe how its built environment was slowly boiled to death by privatisation. And they will wonder why people tolerated this transfer of collective wealth from taxpayers to shareholders. And they will perhaps turn their attention to Eduardo Paolozzi’s fabled mosaics at Tottenham Court Road underground station.

Back in 2015, a debate has bubbled briefly, after some of these lovely, publicly owned mosaic murals were quietly dismantled as part of the station’s thorough £400m Crossrail seeing-to. I say “debate”; it was really only that polarised quackbait thing we have now: Click If You Think The Mosaics Are Great, We Should Save What’s Left Of Them v Smash Them Up They’re Ugly, Anyway Who Cares It’s Just Patterns On A Wall.

Arguments about the aesthetics of Paolozzi’s mosaics missed the point, it seemed to me, which has less to do with the merit of the art itself and more to do with what, in the long run, it turned out the art was for. Paolozzi’s legacy had stood intact for three decades. Not just as 1,000 sq m of charming, optimistic art, but as 1,000 sq m of commercial retardant.

You can’t paste an ad on to a wallful of public art. You can’t fix one of those irritating micromovies over it, telling a vacuous five-second story about investments or vitamins or hair. The Paolozzi mosaics went up as decorative art, just as privatisation was about to explode like a dirty bomb all over the public realm. What survives at Tottenham Court Road station is a brave, forlorn little seawall set against a stormtide of corporate advertising.

1982 it was, when those mosaics were unveiled. British Petroleum had already been privatised. British Aerospace, too, and a slew of others. The right to buy had been introduced a couple of years earlier. Still to come: BT, ports, buses, British Leyland, British Steel, Rover, gas, electricity, water, the railways. All those non-coloured Monopoly cards? Wait, wait, you can’t privatise those, they’re public utilities, clue’s in the name, oh, too late. It was a free-market frenzy. Everything we owned was being flogged off by pinstriped bastards reeking of lunch.

I say “we”, although the greatest trick Thatcherism ever pulled was this redefinition of “us and them”. Suddenly, people in your own family were voting Tory. Mrs Thatcher’s chief information officer, Rupert Murdoch, was telling us that the firemen and the dustmen were our enemies. That the women of the NUT and Nalgo were the mad, selfish defenders of a doomed elite. The Tory government went after the local authorities, telling us that government itself was our enemy. You were just going: “Hold on a minute, if you’re the government …” and then they shouted: “Oh, God, look! The Falklands!”, hired more expensive PR guys and carried on privatising. All through the reign of Margaret the Baby-Eater. Through John Major’s steady-as-you-go age of dinge. And into the sunlit uplands of Blairvana where, ingeniously, the government launched a full-scale privatisation of the future: the public finance initiative. Of all the Tory policies adopted by the Labour government, none was Torier than PFI. This policy wore a black cape and a top hat. It twirled a moustache and cackled. “Oh, you’d like a hospital? Allow me to build one for you, no charge. Just rent it back from us for, let’s say, 50 years, plus service charges; exactly, minister, why worry, you’ll be out of the cabinet and on our board soon enough. Waiter! We’ll see the pudding menu now …” Instead of snapping this brittle cack in half and binning it, Labour embarked on a massive PFI expansion. Now our children owe billions to PFI shareholders, and it’s no consolation at all to think that our grandchildren will, too.

But there was a time when “we” were winning. The “we” I always understood to be “us”, that is. The collective us. Before the privatisation of air and space. Let me tell you, little ones, about how popular music and the bright optimism of collective space came together long ago in London’s heady, soot-laden, pre-privatised air of 1967. Song of the summer was Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks, with its odd blend of keening melancholy and positivism. Nostalgia for a doomed postwar world, exhilaration for the coming of a new post-industrial one. Terry and Julie, facing the future unafraid. Wherever you went, it floated into earshot on a tide of treble from someone’s transistor radio.

And if you were Terry and Julie gazing at a Waterloo sunset in the summer of 67, you’d have seen the Hayward Gallery under construction. The beautiful, brilliant, brutalist Hayward, part of a people’s South Bank that had started with the Festival Hall in 1951 and would end triumphantly with the National Theatre in the 1970s. And we did gaze at it, thinking: “This is us.” This is us, building something amazing, for us. Several eminent architects worked on the scheme, but oversight belonged to the GLC architects department. Imagine that. A time when most architects worked in the public sector, designing a world of public space and collective aspiration, a world of affordable housing with statutory space standards. Crazy days, when a giant yellow Aviva ad on the NT’s western wall was unimaginable.

Then, suddenly, architecture, like everything else, was privatised. The 1980s saw deregulation, not only of the financial markets, but also of the professions. The number of local-authority architects plummeted under a regime of cuts; the harsh winter of recession in 1990 finished them off. From now on, space and air would be shaped and primped by the private sector. Architecture was redefined: no longer frozen music, but petrified Thatcherism. The client’s brief was to choke as much value out of a site as possible, and the model was Broadgate. That shoulder-padded yuppie citadel, which unlocked so much subsequent property value in east London. It seems so weird that it’s old enough now – 30 years – to be listed as a historic building itself, even as it continues to grow, ever more offices cramming in, and a fortune being made from it, somewhere, by tanned people with watchful lawyers.

Very few people now remember what was there before – Broad Street railway station and its environs. The station architecture wasn’t particularly distinguished, but that wasn’t the loss. It was the space, 32 acres of nationalised space and air, once managed by us as a part of a nationalised industry.

Broadgate looks great in photographs, particularly in night shots. The little central public space, the little public ice rink. Lovely. But this space was and remains a concession, a “planning gain” to sweeten the deal. Look, nobody’s suggesting that Broadgate should have been a 32-acre ornamental garden, as attractive as that sounds. Wait, actually, yeah: public gardens would have been fantastic, come to think of it. However, of course the city needs offices. And Arup’s Peter Foggo, highly regarded in the profession, designed much of Broadgate. It looks pretty good, which is why the architectural historians want to save it.

But it has nothing to do with us, does it? It’s privatised space and air. Broadgate became a template for capitalism. Broad Street station, British Rail, everything we owned at the time was sold off cheaply to developers, who then sanctimoniously sold us back this narrative of humane regeneration and philanthropy. Hire an eminent architect, stick a public garden in the middle, bosh. Done. We swallowed the lot. Loadsamoney, planner-friendly, enlightened patronage. Suddenly entrepreneurs were “patrons of the arts”. Of course they were. That’s where the money was.

And as more of what used to belong to “us” was sold off and developed by “them”, the hunger for floorplates and square footage and award-winning design and river views became insatiable. If they ran out of land to build on, no problem. They would now literally monetise thin air. The principle of “air rights” development in London was nailed by architect Terry Farrell’s Embankment Place. A client could commission a great design saturated with Farrell’s trademark postmodern wave-it-through-planning magic, acquire the air rights above Charing Cross station and whack a massive office block on the roof. Ingenious. A private incubus squatting on an anaesthetised public space.

Bit by bit, the city has been handed by us to them. It’s now acceptable for the privatised space of a shopping centre to be patrolled by private security. There are enforceable dress codes, which is a laugh, considering those ill-fitting security uniforms. No loitering – another hypocrisy, as that’s pretty much 100% of a security guard’s job. They’ll all have Tasers soon. A 2011 London Assembly report – Public Life in Private Hands: Managing London’s Public Space – said the mayor of London was concerned that “there is a growing trend towards the private management of publicly accessible space. Where this type of ‘corporatisation’ occurs, especially in the larger commercial developments, Londoners can feel themselves excluded from parts of their own city.”

That’s Boris Johnson there, the freewheeling ultra-Tory ox. Like me, like us, he’s having an emotional reaction to witnessing the very fabric of the city, and the air around it, and the economy around that, being aggregated into some vast equity milking parlour by the very arseholes who smashed everything to bits the last time. Obviously, the mayor simply wants them to behave in a more gentlemanly fashion, whereas some of us want them roughly arrested, electronically tagged and confined to their extinct volcano lairs, but it’s nice to know we’re on the same page.

Oh, man, and just look at London’s privatised skyline. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so cartoonishly tragic. This one looks like a Nespresso machine. And that one, a cigar, is it? Potato? Full nappy? The utter capitulation of London’s planning system in the face of serious money is detectable right there in that infantile, random collection of improbable sex toys poking gormlessly into the privatised air. Public access? Yeah, we’ll definitely put a public park at the top (by appointment only). Oh, absolutely, we are ALL about community engagement: members of the public are welcome to visit our viewing gallery in the sky, that’ll be 30 quid, madam.

The great modernist architectural mantra is “form follows function”. I think we can safely call time on that one, don’t you? What could possibly be going on in that skyscraper? What would compel it to resemble a Shewee? Are you kidding? Architecture, you’re drunk, as usual, on one gin and tonic.

Oh, I know there are those who say it doesn’t matter that all this towering sequestered air belongs to them and not to us, that ownership doesn’t alter the way the world looks. Really? REALLY? I’d rather be the us who built the South Bank, than the them who built that skein of phlegm, the Shard. That scaly talon, that giant middle finger presented to us all. I loathe its banality. The view from inside is better (no visible Shard), but it feels as if you’re inside some giant advert for double glazing. I loathe its monstrous, bullying scale. It’s Gulliver big. End-of-level-boss big. Its stupid anything-goes-now size mocks us.

And how I loathe the rhetorical guff, as empty as that “ultra-prime” floorspace at the top of the building itself. Its architect, Renzo Piano, calls it “a vertical city”? Really? It’s not Milton bloody Keynes, is it? A city must contain members of the public. That’s basic. Well, there aren’t many members of the public in the Shard, and they’re easily identifiable. They’re either there for drinks and dinner or they’re there for a meeting. They’ve either got a table reservation or they’re wearing a lanyard. Cities don’t have guest lists. The Shard is not a city. Where’s the school, the hospital, the weird newsagent’s that sells tinned pies? Where’s the social housing, the dodgy pub, the library? Come on.

Yet the orthodoxy prevails. London must attract investment. It mustn’t upset the capricious bankers and fickle wankers of capitalism, the lease-for-lifers, the buy-to-leavers. A low, grey sky of resignation about privatisation has settled over us. But if history and economics teach us anything, it’s that we have absolutely no idea what happens next.

On the current track, maybe life does become unbearable in the future, when the last remaining cubic centimetre of public space – a trembling pocket of air perhaps, in a cellar at the Emirates British Library – is finally acquired by a friend of King Charles III. At some point, there’ll be no more space left to squeeze and monetise. The city’s overlords will own everything. Qatari, Saudi, Russian, Indian, Chinese, some UK hedge funds named after Shakespearian characters – all air will be their air.

In the future, the thin, sad air inside the last maglev night bus to Upminster, infused with metabolised alcohol, will be theirs. The dark, luxury air in the silent bedrooms of empty riverside apartments, their identical curving blocks clustered in threes and fours, grim and silent as gill slits, will be theirs. The once sacred air of St Paul’s Cathedral Spa and Pamperarium will be theirs.

Then – who knows? Maybe when London is pixellated into billions of stock-marketable units of sequestered air, boing! The world cracks and changes. Iceland acquires the north pole, discovers tons of diamonds and becomes the richest nation on earth. Ghana puts the first woman on Mars. Scientists announce they can convert rising sea levels into environmentally sustainable “brinergy”. The global petrochemical industry suffers a fatal prolapse. Its sheiks and warlords, the fawned-upon princes who once did as they wished – buying up most of Streatham in the morning, beheading someone for sorcery in the afternoon – well, they’re dust and shadow now. Maybe the global property market follows oil down the plughole. London’s last human inhabitants head north, their hovertransits stuffed with electronic belongings and omniplasma, to affordable housing, a temperate climate and a hopeful, collective future.

Or – who knows? Maybe the world economy goes tits up again, only this time we punish the rich instead of the poor. London’s part of a future that casts off the yoke of privatisation. Under new management. Ours. Imagine the London skyline repurposed as a collective landscape. A skyline where form no longer follows function, but where change of use might confer beauty.

Suppose those ridiculous blobs all over Waterloo’s sunset had different occupants. So a child points to the Shard and asks you what it’s for, and instead of trying to explain it’s half-full of dicks in haircuts “doing business”, you’re able to say it’s subsidised housing for key workers. Does it now magically become “architecturally beautiful”? Yes. YES.

And she points to the Gherkin and says: “What’s that?” and you say: “It’s a university.” What a beautiful world that would be. Maybe we can stop everything heading for a privatised wilderness. Let’s renationalise air.

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http://www.alternet.org/world/benjamin-netanyahu-has-been-lying-americans-20-yearsBenjamin Netanyahu Has Been Lying to Americans For 20 Yearshttp://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/85977262/0/alternet_world~Benjamin-Netanyahu-Has-Been-Lying-to-Americans-For-Years

It's a record that members of Congress should ponder on before they leap to applaud for his upcoming address.

Next week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present his case against President Obama's talks with Iran; he is expected to portray Iran as an untrustworthy actor and Obama's diplomacy as naive and a distraction from more sanctions or even military action.

This case suffered a major setback this week as a major intelligence leak showed that Israel's own intelligence service, the Mossad, privately contradicted Netanyahu's public statements on Iran. The leaked secret cables show that as Netanyahu was presenting at the United Nations in 2012 a narrative that Iran that was just “weeks” away from producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, Israel's own intelligence service found a very different conclusion. From The Guardian:

Mossad took a different view. In a report shared with South African spies on 22 October 2012 – but likely written earlier – it conceded that Iran was “working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors, which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given”.

But the report also states that Iran “does not appear to be ready” to enrich uranium to the higher levels necessary for nuclear weapons. To build a bomb requires enrichment to 90%. Mossad estimated that Iran then had “about 100kg of material enriched to 20%” (which was later diluted or converted under the terms of the 2013 Geneva agreement). Iran has always said it is developing a nuclear programme for civilian energy purposes.

But Netanyahu's politicization of the Iran situation is nothing new. For decades, he has misled if not outright lied to Western allies about Iran's nuclear program as well as Iraq's. It's a record that Members of Congress should ponder on before they leap to applaud for his upcoming address.

Netanyahu's Tall Tales On Iran And Iraq

In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu wasn't yet Prime Minister; he was a Likud member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament. He told his fellow lawmakers that Iran was 3 to 5 years away from a nuclear bomb, and that the only way to stop them was for them to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.”

By 1996, Netanyahu rode a right-wing wave in Israel and was elected Prime Minister; in July he was given his first opportunity to address the U.S. Congress. In his speech, he said Iran was the “most dangerous” of Middle East regimes and warned about the consequences of it acquiring nuclear weapons, saying that it would create “catastrophic consequences...for all of mankind.” He drew on many of the same themes he first introduced in his bookFighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists. In that book he warned that “hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions” would perish if Iran were to possess nuclear weapons.

In both his speech to Congress and his book published a year earlier, he dedicated a significant amount of words to the supposed Iraq WMD threat as well. In 2002, he appeared before Congress as a private citizen to join a Congressional panel looking into the alleged threat from Iraq.

There’s no question that [Saddam] has not given upon on his nuclear program, not [sic] whatsoever. There is also no question that he was not satisfied with the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that he had and was trying to perfect them constantly…So I think, frankly, it is not serious to assume that this man, who 20 years ago was very close to producing an atomic bomb, spent the last 20 years sitting on his hands. He has not. And every indication we have is that he is pursuing, pursuing with abandon, pursuing with every ounce of effort, the establishment of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. If anyone makes an opposite assumption or cannot draw the lines connecting the dots, that is simply not an objective assessment of what has happened. Saddam is hell-bent on achieving atomic bombs, atomic capabilities, as soon as he can

Netanyahu went on to tell Congress that he believes “that even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover these portable manufacturing sites of death” – referring to centrifuges Iraq was supposedly using to produce nuclear weapons. In other words: nothing short of war was going to stop this Iraqi threat.

Watch his an excerpt of his speech below:

Thirteen years later, Netanyahu has yet to offer any sort of mea culpa for his remarks before the Congress about Iraq, but he did return his sights to his original target: Iran. In September of 2012, he appeared on Meet The Press to claim that Iran was “very close, they are six months away from being about 90 percent of having the enriched uranium for an atom bomb.” And it was that year where he gave his infamous cartoon-bomb-chart-assisted U.N. speech, which the recent leaks of Mossad intelligence severely undercut.

Calling His Bluff?

In 2001, a private video was filmed of Netanyahu at a campaign supporter's house shows him boasting that “America is a thing you can move very easily” – noting that he purposely dragged on the process with the Palestinians in order to prevent any resolution.

And indeed during his 2011 speech to Congress, he seemed to be proved correct. At that time, Members of Congress gave him 29 standing ovations, more than they gave their own president.

It's a record that members of Congress should ponder on before they leap to applaud for his upcoming address.

Next week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will present his case against President Obama's talks with Iran; he is expected to portray Iran as an untrustworthy actor and Obama's diplomacy as naive and a distraction from more sanctions or even military action.

This case suffered a major setback this week as a major intelligence leak showed that Israel's own intelligence service, the Mossad, privately contradicted Netanyahu's public statements on Iran. The leaked secret cables show that as Netanyahu was presenting at the United Nations in 2012 a narrative that Iran that was just “weeks” away from producing enough enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb, Israel's own intelligence service found a very different conclusion. From The Guardian:

Mossad took a different view. In a report shared with South African spies on 22 October 2012 – but likely written earlier – it conceded that Iran was “working to close gaps in areas that appear legitimate, such as enrichment reactors, which will reduce the time required to produce weapons from the time the instruction is actually given”.

But the report also states that Iran “does not appear to be ready” to enrich uranium to the higher levels necessary for nuclear weapons. To build a bomb requires enrichment to 90%. Mossad estimated that Iran then had “about 100kg of material enriched to 20%” (which was later diluted or converted under the terms of the 2013 Geneva agreement). Iran has always said it is developing a nuclear programme for civilian energy purposes.

But Netanyahu's politicization of the Iran situation is nothing new. For decades, he has misled if not outright lied to Western allies about Iran's nuclear program as well as Iraq's. It's a record that Members of Congress should ponder on before they leap to applaud for his upcoming address.

Netanyahu's Tall Tales On Iran And Iraq

In 1992, Benjamin Netanyahu wasn't yet Prime Minister; he was a Likud member of the Knesset, Israel's parliament. He told his fellow lawmakers that Iran was 3 to 5 years away from a nuclear bomb, and that the only way to stop them was for them to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the U.S.”

By 1996, Netanyahu rode a right-wing wave in Israel and was elected Prime Minister; in July he was given his first opportunity to address the U.S. Congress. In his speech, he said Iran was the “most dangerous” of Middle East regimes and warned about the consequences of it acquiring nuclear weapons, saying that it would create “catastrophic consequences...for all of mankind.” He drew on many of the same themes he first introduced in his bookFighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists. In that book he warned that “hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions” would perish if Iran were to possess nuclear weapons.

In both his speech to Congress and his book published a year earlier, he dedicated a significant amount of words to the supposed Iraq WMD threat as well. In 2002, he appeared before Congress as a private citizen to join a Congressional panel looking into the alleged threat from Iraq.

There’s no question that [Saddam] has not given upon on his nuclear program, not [sic] whatsoever. There is also no question that he was not satisfied with the arsenal of chemical and biological weapons that he had and was trying to perfect them constantly…So I think, frankly, it is not serious to assume that this man, who 20 years ago was very close to producing an atomic bomb, spent the last 20 years sitting on his hands. He has not. And every indication we have is that he is pursuing, pursuing with abandon, pursuing with every ounce of effort, the establishment of weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. If anyone makes an opposite assumption or cannot draw the lines connecting the dots, that is simply not an objective assessment of what has happened. Saddam is hell-bent on achieving atomic bombs, atomic capabilities, as soon as he can

Netanyahu went on to tell Congress that he believes “that even free and unfettered inspections will not uncover these portable manufacturing sites of death” – referring to centrifuges Iraq was supposedly using to produce nuclear weapons. In other words: nothing short of war was going to stop this Iraqi threat.

Watch his an excerpt of his speech below:

Thirteen years later, Netanyahu has yet to offer any sort of mea culpa for his remarks before the Congress about Iraq, but he did return his sights to his original target: Iran. In September of 2012, he appeared on Meet The Press to claim that Iran was “very close, they are six months away from being about 90 percent of having the enriched uranium for an atom bomb.” And it was that year where he gave his infamous cartoon-bomb-chart-assisted U.N. speech, which the recent leaks of Mossad intelligence severely undercut.

Calling His Bluff?

In 2001, a private video was filmed of Netanyahu at a campaign supporter's house shows him boasting that “America is a thing you can move very easily” – noting that he purposely dragged on the process with the Palestinians in order to prevent any resolution.

And indeed during his 2011 speech to Congress, he seemed to be proved correct. At that time, Members of Congress gave him 29 standing ovations, more than they gave their own president.

Apple’s newest progress report, on its labor conditions in China, was released February 11.

“We care deeply about every worker in Apple's global supply chain,” stated senior vice president of operations Jeff Williams upon release of the report. “To improve their lives, we continue to proactively tackle issues that are part of the broader challenges facing our world today — human rights and equality, environmental protection, and education. We have long championed these causes, and 2014 was a year of tremendous progress."

The timing of Apple’s report is at least a little suspicious: it came less than 24 hours after a new China Labor Watch report that connects the company to ongoing labor abuses. The group is an NGO, formed in 2000, to fight for worker’s rights in China. The report focuses on the Pegatron Shanghai factory, a subsidiary of the Taiwanese-owned Pegatron Group and a major electronics supplier for Apple. The supplier now produces core products, like the iPhone 6 and iPad Mini.

One of the most striking takeaways from the report concerns the impact that activism, and subsequent media coverage, has had on Apple’s labor reforms. While Apple frequently implies its modifications have come about as a result of self-monitoring, there is a direct correlation between the coverage of labor abuses and shifts in company policy. After many learned about the suicides at Foxconn (the infamous Apple supplierthat has been associated with a string of labor abuses) during the summer of 2010, Foxconn wages increased. Conditions also improved after a 2012 New York Times story about the human cost of iPads. Apple also joined the Fair Labor Association and hired a third-party organization to improve its public image. Most recently, a 2014 BBC reported on the conditions of workers at Pegatron. Weekly hours decreased soon after.

The report suggests that Apple jumps from manufacturer to manufacturer in an attempt to solidify lower costs, thus naturally aligning itself with lower and lower wages. In a recent interview, one of the report's authors, Kevin Slaten, the program coordinator at China Labor Watch, explained that Pegatron was even worse than Foxconn. “For base pay alone, there’s a 21% difference. For example, the base pay for a typical production worker (after the probation period) is 2,300 RMB (about U.S.$370) at Foxconn and 1,820 RMB (U.S.$290) at Pegatron. What this doesn’t include is that Pegatron hires an enormous number of dispatch workers who are temp workers, and they save money on these temp workers because they don’t pay them full benefits and they don’t have to pay wages to them in the low season."

Apple’s newest progress report, on its labor conditions in China, was released February 11.

“We care deeply about every worker in Apple's global supply chain,” stated senior vice president of operations Jeff Williams upon release of the report. “To improve their lives, we continue to proactively tackle issues that are part of the broader challenges facing our world today — human rights and equality, environmental protection, and education. We have long championed these causes, and 2014 was a year of tremendous progress."

The timing of Apple’s report is at least a little suspicious: it came less than 24 hours after a new China Labor Watch report that connects the company to ongoing labor abuses. The group is an NGO, formed in 2000, to fight for worker’s rights in China. The report focuses on the Pegatron Shanghai factory, a subsidiary of the Taiwanese-owned Pegatron Group and a major electronics supplier for Apple. The supplier now produces core products, like the iPhone 6 and iPad Mini.

One of the most striking takeaways from the report concerns the impact that activism, and subsequent media coverage, has had on Apple’s labor reforms. While Apple frequently implies its modifications have come about as a result of self-monitoring, there is a direct correlation between the coverage of labor abuses and shifts in company policy. After many learned about the suicides at Foxconn (the infamous Apple supplierthat has been associated with a string of labor abuses) during the summer of 2010, Foxconn wages increased. Conditions also improved after a 2012 New York Times story about the human cost of iPads. Apple also joined the Fair Labor Association and hired a third-party organization to improve its public image. Most recently, a 2014 BBC reported on the conditions of workers at Pegatron. Weekly hours decreased soon after.

The report suggests that Apple jumps from manufacturer to manufacturer in an attempt to solidify lower costs, thus naturally aligning itself with lower and lower wages. In a recent interview, one of the report's authors, Kevin Slaten, the program coordinator at China Labor Watch, explained that Pegatron was even worse than Foxconn. “For base pay alone, there’s a 21% difference. For example, the base pay for a typical production worker (after the probation period) is 2,300 RMB (about U.S.$370) at Foxconn and 1,820 RMB (U.S.$290) at Pegatron. What this doesn’t include is that Pegatron hires an enormous number of dispatch workers who are temp workers, and they save money on these temp workers because they don’t pay them full benefits and they don’t have to pay wages to them in the low season."